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IN THE OLD PATHS 




D c 23/u.«tr 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 
Penn Church from the Vicarage garden. 



IN THE OLD PATHS 

MEMORIES 
OF LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



BY 

ARTHUR GRANT 



'■* Ask for the old paths." 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1914 



19 I 





o^\o^ 



243760 

2MNSFERRED FROM PUBL,C LIBRARY 



PREFATORY NOTE 

TT is a pleasant duty to thank the Editors of The 

Scotsman and The Atlantic Monthly, respectively, 

for their kind permission to the reprinting of these 

Essays in a more permanent shape. Since their 

appearance in their original form, the Papers have 

been revised and enlarged, before they were linked 

together in the present volume. 

A. G. 

St. Johns, 

Colinton, Midlothian, 
September, 191 3 



r 



* 



CONTENTS 



IN THE OLD PATHS 

PAGE 

I. In the Old Paths : Hertfordshire Revisited . I 
II. Wheathampstead and Charles Lamb . . .11 

III. The Rigour of the Year : Amid the Old Paths of 

the Homeland 25 

AMONG THE BEECHES OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 

IV. In England's Pennsylvania : 

1. Penn Village, Stoke Pogis, and Chalfont 

St. Giles ...... 37 

2. JORDANS AND WlLLIAM PeNN ... • 49 

V. Stoke Pogis and Thomas Gray . . . . 6i 

VI. The Homeland of the Disraelis .... 75 

VII. November Days : Some Autumn Memories . . 87 

IN SHAKESPEARE'S ARDEN 

VIII. Evenings in Arden : A Shakespearian Reverie . 99 

IX. With Somervile in Arden : An Idyl of the Hunting- 
Field in 

X. From Arden to Arcady : A Raid into Shenstone's 

Country . . . . . . .127 

XL Shenstone, a Poet of Arcady .... 143 



CONTENTS 

MEMORIES OF LICHFIELD 



PACiE 



XII. " The Ladies of the Vale " ..... 159 

OXFORD AND THE COTSWOLDS 

XIII. In the Footsteps of " Thyrsis " and " The Scholar- 

Gipsy " 173 

XIV. Fairford and John Keble ..... 193 
XV. In the Cotswold Country ..... 207 

AMID THE HAUNTS OF COWPER 

XVI. A Visit to Cowper's Birthplace .... 221 

XVII. " Like unto Them that Dream " : A Pilgrimage 

from Huntingdon to St. Ives . . .231 

XVIII. Memories of Olney ...... 245 

" THE E'EN BRINGS A' HAME " 
XIX. In a Colinton Garden : Winter .... 257 
XX. The Epilogue ....... 271 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



9- 

10. 

1 1. 

12. 
13. 

H- 
15- 
16. 



Penn Church from the Vicarage Garden 

A corner of Penn Village .... 

The Village Inn, Penn .... 

Penn Church (another view) 

Jordans Burying-ground .... 

Amersham ...... 

" The Hay Binder's Arms," near Waddesdon 
"The Olde Shipe," Grendon Underwood 
The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on- 
Mary Arden's Cottage, Wilmcote 
Beaudesert Church, Warwickshire 
Distant view of Lichfield . 
Lichfield Cathedral (west front) . 
Samuel Johnson's House, Lichfield 
Oxford's Towers from Cumnor Hill-side 
Fairford Church, Gloucestershire 



Avo 



Frontispiece 

PAGE 

39 
4i 
43 
51 

58 

94 

97 

107 

114 

'33 
161 

165 
169 
181 

•97 



IN THE OLD PATHS: 
HERTFORDSHIRE REVISITED 



When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
I summon up remembrance of things past. 

Shakespeare's Sonnets. 



IN THE OLD PATHS : 

HERTFORDSHIRE REVISITED 

Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and 
ye shall find rest for your souls. 

THERE comes a time to all of us when our thoughts 
are more or less retrospective, not that we tire 
of seeking pastures new, but we love to recall the old 
paths, where is the good way, and to walk therein. 
Nor do we forget that for those who do so there is the 
Divine promise that " Ye shall find rest for your souls." 
How many a weary soul has been cheered by these 
words ! They breathe a spirit of restfulness far from 
the tumult and strife of modernism. To many of us 
the words of the old Hebrew poet seem to reopen 
vistas of paths trodden long ago, paths that have left 
an unforgotten trail of beauty down the years. The 
wanderer, or the exile from his native land, sees in 
these words some dreamland, it may be, " where 
Gadie rins, at the back o' Ben-no-chie." Visions of 
old bridle-paths over the hills of the Borderland come 
back to my memory after many years, paths dear to 
Scott and Hogg, Veitch and Shairp, and Dr. John 
Brown. Or the old path may lead over the Highland 
hills from one glen to another. As it follows the burn 
you can trace its course by the green birches among the 

3 



4 IN THE OLD PATHS 

purple heather, until, when you reach the plateau- 
like summit of the watershed, half of Scotland spreads 
out before you in one glorious panorama. Then comes 
the familiar descent down through the fir woods until 
once more the great river rolls past at your feet, now 
in great swirling cataracts, now as silent as some English 
river in the Midlands, 

Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, 

and you experience that rest, that peace which the 
busy world cannot give. 

There is a certain perplexity connected with this 
hankering after the old paths, for we cannot allow our- 
selves to forget the charm of fresh ways over the land, 
when the interest of a long day's journey in a new 
country never flags, where every turn of the road 
brings a new vista, forms a new combination of fea- 
tures that are already becoming familiar. The stately 
river, the groups of poplars, the church towers have 
become in the course of the day like old friends ; only, 
as in a picture, their relation to each other changes, 
forming a new composition, and that new path before 
the end of the day becomes another memory to take 
its place among the old paths. Perhaps I am admitting 
too readily these new paths into the fellowship of the 
old ; but I have in my mind's eye certain byways that, 
though but recently visited for the first time, have long 
been cherished, even as Charles and Mary Lamb talked 
of Mackery End for years before they actually revelled 
in the leafy lanes that surround the Jacobean manor- 
house and farm of that name. For you the new path 
may have no personal memories while you wander 



IN THE OLD PATHS 5 

through its glades, yet its old-world story mingles with 
the spirit of your pilgrimage, and you walk in an atmo- 
sphere of sunshine and hero-worship. Many charming 
byways, my memories of which are preserved in this 
volume, have long been old paths in this literary sense. 
On the other hand, the restfulness of some of the old 
paths that in days gone by have echoed to your foot- 
steps is sometimes accompanied by a perhaps almost 
inevitable touch of sadness. Wordsworth, in revisiting 
Yarrow with Sir Walter Scott, then broken in health, 
gave expression to this thought when he wrote of 
Yarrow that 

Did meet us with unaltered face, 
Though we were changed and changing. 

Sir Walter himself expressed it in the touching poem 
on Weirdlaw Hill, when, looking around on the old 
familiar scenes that he had done so much to im- 
mortalise, his bruised spirit exclaimed in its pain : — 

Are they still such as once they were, 
Or is the dreary change in me ? 

Brave Sir Walter ! Somehow we cannot lift a pen 
without thinking of him. But to return. The charm 
of that passage from Jeremiah is its restfulness. It 
leads you by green pastures and beside still waters to a 
haven of rest. There may be a sternness about the 
perpetual hills and the ever-flowing river, but there is 
no cold sphinx-like eternity about the old paths. 

Thoughts such as these presented themselves to my 
mind as I revisited the paths and lanes of Hertfordshire 
after a long absence. Some of them I had not seen 
for many years, and you may be sure that I selected 



6 IN THE OLD PATHS 

these old paths for my first rambles. It was amid the 
brilliant weather of September, 1907, when, like the 
paths of the just, the sun shone more and more unto 
the perfect day. And perfect days they were, when 
the trees stood silent and motionless as in a dream, 
slumbering in the summer haze. The birds were be- 
ginning to sing again in the coppices, and the cattle to 
seek the shade of the beech trees in park and meadow. 
Two years later, as recorded in the succeeding paper, 
I again returned to the old paths to follow in the foot- 
steps of Charles and Mary Lamb. 

For a time my path would lead me close by a stream 
bordered by pollarded willows and artificially choked 
with watercress, for the Herts cress is sent far and wide, 
and then the river would assume its natural appearance, 
widening at times into marshland, in which the water- 
hens were busy. There, too, might be heard the plain- 
tive cry of the lapwing. It is hot in the meadow, and, 
remembering the origin of the name of the county, 
which used to be spelt as pronounced, Hartford, the 
fair scene calls to mind the idyllic simile of another of 
the Hebrew poets, " even as the hart desireth the water- 
brooks," for in olden times this must have been a land 
of springs, brooks, and marsh flowers. Again one hears 
the call of the peewit, and, close at hand, the cheery 
autumn note of the robin. From the brick-and-timber 
cottage yonder, a study in subdued reds and yellows, 
there rises the blue smoke that adds its human touch 
to the peaceful landscape. 

One of the charms of Hertfordshire is its undulating 
character. The breezy upland common is never far 
distant, and so leaving the river-side the path begins to 



IN THE OLD PATHS 7 

ascend to the hanging woods yonder, where the cushats 
are crooning. No one need keep to the white chalk 
road in this countryside. Among the young firs the 
hum of insect life adds to the joyousness of the morn. 
Through the wood the path is vaulted like the long 
aisle of a cathedral, at the far end of which you can 
just see the sunlit park beyond. A squirrel leisurely 
crosses my path, and tame pheasants, that are under- 
stood to be wild, look at you with all the confidence of 
farmyard fowls. Once more I have reached the old 
park, with its manor-house and ruined church, and 
once more I am arrested by the sound of an " Amen " 
coming from an organ-led choir. 

'Twas in 1894 that I first listened in the chancel of 
the ruined Gothic parish church while the stream of 
music swept across the park from the new to the old 
shrine, the old roofless shrine with its hallowed graves. 
Then it was evensong, and as the shadows lengthened, 
the restful music of the Nunc Dimittis, and of New- 
man's hymn, " Lead, Kindly Light," filled the ruined 
aisles with melody. To-day the glorious Venite (95 th 
Psalm) and the triumphant Benedictus, the inspired 
song of the father of St. John, struck a note more 
in unison with the joyous sunshine without. Even the 
Benedictus closes with the hope that our feet may be 
guided " into the way of peace." Unwilling to disturb 
the worshippers, I rested within earshot of the open 
door. The silences, as the good man read the collects 
for the day, were punctuated by the choral " Amens," 
while out in the sunny park Nature's voices proclaimed 
the glory of God. In those mid-September mornings 
after the midsummer silence, the larks once more 



8 IN THE OLD PATHS 

sprang into the lift, and sang their song at heaven's 
gate, " Nature's chapel clerks," old Montgomery called 
them. Then came a longer silence, and as the preacher's 
voice rose and fell, his cadences might have had a slum- 
berous effect, were it not for the eloquent voices with- 
out. Suddenly my reverie was disturbed by the organ 
playing an old Scots common- metre Psalm tune. 
Surely that is not " Martyrdom," but there was no 
mistaking it when the congregation took up the wail. 
The E celesta Anglic ana and her stately ritual faded 
into the light of common day, as Wordsworth would 
have said. In its place stood for the nonce an old Scots 
parish kirk with canopied pulpit, desk, and box pews, 
and instead of the white-surpliced English vicar, I saw 
a kindly, cultured, white-haired Scots divine of the 
school of the old Moderates. As verse after verse, sung 
to the old tune, wailed forth the familiar melody, so 
long did the illusion last. I seemed to wait for the 
beadle to draw up the bolts and open the doors before 
the benediction in anticipation of the " skailin'. " 

With the closing strains of " Martyrdom " faded the 
dream-picture of the Scots kirk and its old minister. 
It all happened so simply. The vicar had chosen for 
his concluding hymn, " As pants the hart for cooling 
streams," set to the old tune. The hymn itself is 
simply a seventeenth-century paraphrase of the 42nd 
Psalm, " Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks," 
and as such was sung by English Churchmen in the days 
when they still believed in Tate and Brady. 

Truly, the association of music works strange freaks 
in the human mind. I am on English ground, listening 
to the music of an English church service ; but, as 



IN THE OLD PATHS 9 

Richard Wagner, writing on Beethoven, once put it, 
" we are conscious of another world which manifests 
itself by sound, and is perceptible only to the hearing, 
a true world of sound by the side of a world of light." 
The world of light is all around in the open park, but 
the world of sound and its associations had closed the 
eyelids and led the waking brain into a dreamland that 
heeds not time nor space, substituting for the living 
present a vision of the past. But I seem to be wander- 
ing in thought far from my old path, and as the mem- 
bers of the village congregation wend their ways across 
the park it is time for me to return to my temporary 
home. Down again through the wood, under its 
Gothic arches and over the stile, I followed the path 
once more, down again to the stream where the harts 
once panted for the water-brooks. 



These " halcyon-days " cannot last for ever ; but 
still within a mile or two of Edinburgh town there are 
old paths full of quiet beauty and restfulness. Alas ! 
in October they led through many a sodden field, and 
sometimes the sun would shine through a silver haze of 
mist and the continuous drizzle took the form of silver 
rain. The grouping of light and shade was beautiful 
beyond words, but the fields had long been ripe unto 
the harvest and the Scottish farmer had been waiting 
wearily, wearily. At last, as I write the concluding 
sentences of this paper, we are bathed in a kind of 
Indian summer, a world of light and sunshine. It is 
mid-November. The elms are all but leafless ; the ash 
holds out, as well it might, for this year it seemed as 



io IN THE OLD PATHS 

if it would never burst into foliage ; the beeches make 
a brave show, but they have shed so many of their 
leaves that the homeland path is like one long gorgeous 
avenue carpeted with russet gold. At the present 
moment athwart the brilliant sunshine the leaves are 
still falling, oh, so silently, like golden flakes, and the 
old paths are buried for a time in the elements from 
which they derived their summer glory. 



II 

WHEATHAMPSTEAD AND CHARLES LAMB 



The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End, or Mackarel End, 
as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertford- 
shire, a farm-house, delightfully situated within a gentle walk from 
Wheathampstead. — Charles Lamb. 



WHEATHAMPSTEAD AND CHARLES 
LAMB 

ONCE more it is September, and once more I am 
amid the old paths, the old lanes of Hertford- 
shire, this time after an interval of two years only. 

Wheathampstead is mainly known to lovers of Eng- 
lish literature through Charles Lamb's incidental refer- 
ence to this old-world village in one of the finest of his 
autobiographical essays, " Mackery End, in Hertford- 
shire." All his life he had heard his sister talk of 
Mackery End, a farmhouse within a gentle walk of 
Wheathampstead. The old farmhouse, the wood- 
house, the pigeon-house, and the orchard were to him 
a dream of infancy, and so at last, when that pathetic 
pair did visit this part of Hertfordshire, Lamb was too 
full of Mackery End to tell us anything about Wheat- 
hampstead. It must be confessed that as a name 
Mackery End or Macry End, like Stoke Pogis, has not 
much to charm. A shrine, indeed, is twice blessed 
when added to its associations its name has a haunting 
melody all its own ; so it is with Wheathampstead, " so 
called of the corne " for which the county has been 
famous for centuries. Euston Road and King's Cross 
do not suggest " the sweet security of streets," what- 
ever Charles Lamb may say ; but when, within an 
hour of leaving London, you step on to the platform 
at Wheathampstead station, you feel at peace with all 

13 



i 4 WHEATHAMPSTEAD 

mankind. All our worries are forgotten as we reach 
beloved Hatfield of many memories, and proceed by 
the leisurely single branch line between Hatfield and 
Luton, following the course of the tiny Upper Lea, the 
river whose lower reaches are dear to the memory of 
Izaak Walton. 

Don't be in a hurry to leave Wheathampstead 
station, for it is situated on a gentle height facing 
southwards, and when the train moves off, you will find 
that the whole village lies before you. As a picture 
how beautifully it composes ! The spire of the parish 
church and the roofs of both nave and choir appear 
above the trees, and the eye lingers restfully on the 
great chestnut trees that separate the churchyard 
yonder from the rectory. In the foreground there is 
the warmth of red-brick cottages, weather-stained 
barns, and the stately chimneys of a seventeenth- 
century farmhouse. A few spruces give an additional 
character to this ideally English landscape. Away to 
the south towards St. Albans the road ascends until it 
is lost in the pastoral common of No Man's Land. As 
Autolycus put it to me, however, " If you tried to 
shoot a hare or a rabbit on that 'ere common you would 
soon find out whether or not it was no man's land ; 
but, bless you," he continued, and a nod is as good as a 
wink, " there were ways and means." Autolycus knew 
all about it. I have a great respect for Autolycus and 
his opinions. It was he who informed me that Red- 
bourn Church, a few miles distant, was built by Julius 
Caesar, and referred me to the parson for corroboration. 
A few days later he accidentally met me at St. Albans, 
opposite an ancient hostelry (every other house is one, 



WHEATHAMPSTEAD 15 

so that the coincidence does not count for much), and 
kindly inquired if I had found the old church. The 
rogue, where shall I meet him next, at Stamford Fair 
in the company of mad Shallow, or in the company of 
old Sly's son in the neighbourhood of Marian Hacket's? 
But this is trifling. 

Leaving Wheathampstead station, the road winds 
through the village, across the river Lea at the old 
bridge, and up the steep ascent to No Man's Land. I 
must not, however, be led astray from the objects of 
my pilgrimage, and so I enter the churchyard by its 
quaint lichgate, and renew my acquaintance with the 
old church of St. Helens, Wheathampstead. The 
swallows were collecting on the warm southern roof 
on the day of my visit. A few days later I saw them 
encircling the great Norman tower of St. Albans 
Abbey in their wheeling flights. It was a pleasing 
association, as old as the days of the Psalmist. Quant 
dilecta sunt tabernacula. 

" Wouldst thou know," writes Charles Lamb, " the 
beauty of holiness ? — go alone on some week day, 
borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse 
the cool aisles of some country church : think of the 
piety that has kneeled there — the congregations, old 
and young, that have found consolation there — the 
meek pastor — the docile parishioner. With no dis- 
turbing element, no cross conflicting comparisons, 
drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself 
become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies 
that weep and kneel around thee." 

Of such is St. Helens, Wheathampstead. In former 
years I borrowed the keys, but now the door in the 



1 6 WHEATHAMPSTEAD 

north porch is open, and the rector, Canon Davys, 
who is himself an authority on Church architecture 
and Church music, has placed a notice in the porch 
intimating that the church is " open daily for private 
devotion, quiet rest, or suitable reading, and inspection 
of the building and its memorials." Here are no 
gorgeous windows of the princely Perpendicular period. 
The central tower dates from 1290, and the chancel 
windows consist of the form expressive of the Early 
English period, three long lancet lights. Beneath are 
the poppy-headed stalls of the choir, not the originals, 
unfortunately, but reproductions, made of old oak 
brought from Cambridge. The low screen cutting off 
the north transept is Jacobean work. The transepts 
contain exceptionally fine mural tablets and tombs 
with recumbent effigies of the sixteenth- and seven- 
teenth-century squires and dames. Here the lancet 
windows have given way to the decorated form, and as 
the sun shone through the painted window of the 
south transept it tinged with rose-colour and gold the 
alabaster tombs of a knight and his lady, even as in 
Keats's poem the wintry moon shone through the 
blazoned casement and " threw warm gules on Made- 
line's fair breast." 

But the glory of St. Helens, Wheathampstead, is its 
connection with the Macry family. John of Wheat- 
hampstead, 33rd Abbot of St. Albans, was the son of 
Hugh Bostock and his wife, Margaret Macry or 
Mackery, daughter of Thomas Macry of Macry End. 
Their brasses still pave the floor of the north transept 
of Wheathampstead Parish Church. John Wheathamp- 
stead was twice Abbot of St. Albans, from 1420 to 



WHEATHAMPSTEAD 17 

1440, and again in his old age, from 145 1 to 1464, 
during the civil wars of the Roses. He combined the 
administrative ability of a great ecclesiastic with the 
other accomplishments of Churchmen in those times. 
He was a book-lover, historiographer, and writer of 
verse ; he presented to the abbey church the finest 
organ in any monastery in England ; he designed the 
great screen over the high altar afterwards erected by 
a successor, Abbot Wallingford ; and he erected the 
richly carved watch-loft that guards the shrine 
of St. Alban, on which the wheat-ears of the abbot 
could be distinguished, just as in similar fashion 
the lamb of St. John the Baptist and the eagle of 
St. John the Evangelist were engraved as his insignia 
on the plate presented by him to the church. In St. 
Albans Abbey, now a cathedral, you still may see 
Abbot Wheathampstead's sepulchral chapel opposite 
the great shrine of which he was so proud to be the 
protector that even on the brasses in memory of his 
parents in the Macry Chapel at Wheathampstead he 
described them in Latin as " the father and mother 
of the Shepherd of the Sheep of the Anglican Proto- 
Martyr." 

My path leads me through the Rector's meadow. 
Deborah in her song of triumph referred to the days 
when " the highways were unoccupied and the travel- 
lers walked through byways." To-day we are well 
content to leave the highway to the traveller, reserving 
the byway, Shakespeare's footpath way, for the pil- 
grim ; and in Hertfordshire you never need leave the 
footpath way, unless when lost in a deep Hertfordshire 
lane it may be necessary to find your bearings somehow 



1 8 WHEATHAMPSTEAD 

by clambering through a gap in the hedge, overrun as 
usual with traveller's -joy, red-berried bryony, and 
woody nightshade or bitter-sweet, to where, as Charles 
Kingsley says, the white chalk-fields above are quivering 
hazy in the heat. 

When first I found that the path through the 
Rector's meadow led to a chalk-stream, the famous 
Lea, I longed for Charles Kingsley as my guide. Lamb, 
who knew best the lower reaches of the Lea in Walton's 
country, has a " hit " at the angler of the cockney 
school, " There Hope sits every day speculating upon 
traditionary gudgeons " ; but it was Kingsley's mission 
to sound the praises of English trouting streams, as 
compared with a mountain burn that is "like a turn- 
pike road for three weeks and then like bottled porter 
for three days." Peaceful it is to follow the course of 
the gentle Lea, but not so peaceful to the contemplative 
angler, as Kingsley admits, when your " drop fly is fast 
wrapt in Ceratophyllum and Glyceria, Callitriche, and 
Potamogeton and half a dozen more horrid things with 
long names and longer stems." I know the sort of 
thing Kingsley describes, but which is Callitriche and 
which Potamogeton, I might say with John Byrom, 
" God bless us all ! that's quite another thing." 
Sufficient it is for me to note that marsh flowers still 
linger on the borders of the stream in these autumnal 
mornings. Now the path leads to a wooden bridge, 
close to which there are beds of yellow musk and wild 
mint. From thence the river skirts the by-road as I 
wander westward until I reach a finger-post at the 
junction of what are practically four country lanes 
dominated by a small alehouse bearing the name of 



WHEATHAMPSTEAD 19 

" The Cherry Trees." There are many such alehouses 
in this countryside where the customers must be few 
and far between, and where the income seems to be 
derived from other sources, working an allotment, 
keeping pigs, or selling coals. I noticed, for example, 
that mine host of " The Marquis of Granby," another 
Leaside " public," with a grandiloquent name, varied 
his practice at the bar with that of chimney sweeping. 
Nearer London doubtless there are places not so primi- 
tive, but when I reached " The Cherry Trees " I was 
reminded of a passage in Lamb's delightful essay on 
Old China, a passage which, you remember, he puts into 
the mouth of " Bridget Elia," his sister Mary : — 

" Then do you remember our pleasant walks to 
Enfield, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we had a 
holyday — holydays and all other fun, are gone now we 
are rich — and the little hand-basket in which I used to 
deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad — 
and how you would pry about at noontide for some 
decent house, where we might go in and produce our 
store — only paying for the ale that you must call for — 
and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and 
whether she was likely to allow us a tablecloth — and 
wish for such another hostess, as Izaak Walton has de- 
scribed many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea 
when he went a fishing ? " 

Leaving the pleasant banks of the Lea, the path to 
Macry End leads northward for a few yards, when the 
lane suddenly widens out into a heath, with great 
stretches of old turf on either side of the way, bordered 
by noble elms. The pilgrim's path, however, is yonder 
field track through the gate to the left at the bottom 
of the heath. 



20 WHEATHAMPSTEAD 

On a previous pilgrimage to Macry End the field was 
glowing with purple lucerne. This year, faithful to 
tradition, the land had been sown with wheat. Here 
the harvest had been garnered, and three ploughs were 
already at work, with three horses yoked to each plough. 
The ploughman, amid the September sunshine,whistles 
as he goes, recalling, not Lamb, but Gray, in that ever- 
memorable Elegy, " How jocund did they drive their 
team afield ! " Crossing the fields diagonally, I am 
at last face to face with the red-tiled cottages, the 
Jacobean manor-house, and the farm of Macry End, 
all nestling under their ancestral oaks. 

A veritable haunt of ancient peace is this old seven- 
teenth-century manor-house, the successor, doubtless, 
of the earlier home of John of Wheathampstead. One 
notes the old bell-tower, the clustered chimneys, some 
spiral-shaped, the sundial, the stables deep red and 
lichened, from the roofs of which there comes the 
slumberous cooing of pigeons ; even the stately lawn, 
with its double row of standard roses leading to the 
front of the manor, are suggestive in their formalism 
of old-world gardens. A distant sound of guns in- 
dicates that partridge-shooting has begun among the 
stubble of this old corn country. The whole scene has 
an early Georgian atmosphere about it, that of a manor- 
house of the Stuart period as it would appear in the days 
of George III. To complete the illusion, while the 
lateness of the harvest had somewhat delayed the cub- 
hunting season, I am met at a turn of the road by the 
huntsman exercising his hounds. 

Such were my impressions of the manor-house of 
Macry End ; but Charles and Mary Lamb had no eyes 



WHEATHAMPSTEAD 2 1 

for the manor-house, all their thoughts were centred 
in the farm across the way, where dwelt one of their 
handsome Wheathampstead cousins. " There was a 
grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, 
answering to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which 
would have shined in a palace." How they feasted on 
the fatted calf, drank the home-made wine, and called 
each other by their Christian names, like " Scriptural 
cousins," is familiar to us all. The old yellow-tinted 
front of the farmhouse faces the west, surrounded by 
its great barns, mellowed with age into a study in red, 
gamboge, and brown. The house has evidently been 
added to since Lamb's time, and the modern front, 
facing the east, clothed with ivy, looks out into a 
garden and orchard. 'Tis a quiet pastoral scene, of 
field and meadow bordered with oak, ash, and elm, 
intersected by grass-grown lanes that lead to nowhere 
particular, sometimes to decayed farms far from the 
great roads, where the watch-dogs bark a joyful wel- 
come and the whole population of the poultry-yard 
rush out to greet the infrequent passer-by. 



On the last Sunday of September I return to St. 
Helens, Wheathampstead. Both the name and the 
place have a fascination for me. It is eventide, and as 
I leave the common and enter the footpath through the 
cornfields that lead from Gustardwood towards Wheat- 
hampstead village the setting sun in splashes of red 
and gold is glowing through the elms, as if their mas- 
sive boughs were mullions and transoms of a great 
cathedral window. The six bells of St. Helens are 



22 WHEATHAMPSTEAD 

ringing for evensong, and now the swell of the organ 
is heard, as the choir singing a processional hymn take 
their places in the stalls. When describing St. Helens 
in the full blaze of noonday I did not mention that for 
evening services the church is lit entirely by candles, 
three rows down each side of the nave, a cluster of five 
on either side of the lectern, and four separate clusters 
lighting respectively the pulpit, the two sides of the 
choir, and the sanctuary. The mediaeval effect is very 
striking. For a time the painted windows told their 
stories as long as the daylight lingered ; but the lancet 
windows in the chancel were the first to fade, then the 
candelabra emphasised the shadows of the great dim 
roof and the ponderous pillars of the central tower. 
They cast, too, a Rembrandtesque light on the groups 
of worshippers. We are back into the fourteenth cen- 
tury, contemporaries of John of Wheathampstead and 
Macry End, or of that sweet lady of the alabaster tomb. 
Nothing seemed to break the continuity of that ancient 
sacred service ; church, lessons, liturgy, music, all were 
alike time-hallowed. The old order changeth, but not 
at Wheathampstead. 

But now the day is ended, and with its close so also 
ends another pilgrimage. I hope that it will not be the 
last to the same neighbourhood. Alas ! is there a 
single one of all those hallowed shrines that we would 
not gladly revisit, places dear to our memory, places so 
far removed from the environment and worry of our 
workaday life ! It is in this mood that I bid farewell 
to the Church of St. Helen. As I linger for a moment 
before I turn into the village, only a dim glimmer from 
the monastic-looking tapers of the great church, lights 



WHEATHAMPSTEAD 23 

the churchway path. Beyond the village the over- 
hanging trees of a Hertfordshire lane make the 
September night doubly dark. Not till I reach the 
breezy common at the top of the hill does the white 
chalk-road reflect the radiance of a thousand stars. 



Ill 

THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR: 

AMID THE OLD PATHS OF THE 
HOMELAND 



I see the winter approaching without much concern, though a 
passionate lover of fine weather and the pleasant scenes of summer ; 
but the long evenings have their comforts too, and there is hardly to 
be found upon the earth, I suppose, so snug a creature as an English- 
man by his fireside in the winter. — Cozvper's Letters. 



THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR: 

AMID THE OLD PATHS OF THE HOMELAND 

WHEN I begin to despair of the advent of the 
ideal spring, halcyon-days when one could 
exclaim, " For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over 
and gone," I turn with consolation to William Cowper. 
In his sequestered nooks by the gently flowing Ouse, he 
had nothing else to do but translate Homer and chron- 
icle those delightful trivialities to which in this fretful 
age we turn for solace. It is hard that our ideals should 
be rudely shattered, and when winter lingers in the 
lap of spring or even in that of summer, we sigh for 
the springs of long ago, until Cowper reminds us of 

The long protracted rigour of the year, 

of his experience of " the rigours of winter " in June, 
of " the ice-islands that spoil our summers," and of 
fires in the study even amid the high midsummer 
pomps. " Winter," said a friend of mine emphati- 
cally, " began last year (1909) on the 25th of October." 
He was thinking of his chrysanthemums. On the 24th 
they were in the full blaze of their autumnal glory ; 
on the 25th, like the Flowers of the Forest, they were 
a' wede away. Only a few weeks earlier it was still 
September, and I was wandering among the lanes of 
Hertfordshire, as described in the preceding paper. 

27 



28 THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR 

Winter seemed afar off on that Sunday when I bade 
farewell to St. Helens, Wheathampstead, and when the 
white chalk-road reflected the starry radiance of an 
autumnal evening sky. It was still September, and 
old parish churches clothed in russet and crimson sug- 
gested Cowper, Gray, and Lamb, kindred souls along 
the pilgrim's way. Who does not love September, and 
especially those of us who have reached the September 
of our lives ? Its mellow radiance is in tune with that 
period of " autumnal felicity," as Edward Gibbon 
beautifully expresses it at the close of his Memoir, 
that period into which he himself vainly hoped to 
enter after the arduous labours of his great work. 

Truly the rigour of the year set in with sudden 
swiftness, as the last chrysanthemum drooped even in 
the sheltered corner of the garden. On the 31st of 
October the old canal by Hermiston, sweetest of 
names, was frozen over. It was a strange sight — the 
ice-bound pool against a leafy background, with an 
atmosphere of brilliant autumn sunshine and haze, 
when the distant Pentlands were outlined in the faintest 
wash of cobalt, and the white smoke of the cottages 
rose perpendicularly into the cessile air. Where, on 
the canal, there was open water, the seagulls made a 
pretty picture amid this inland scene ; but the search- 
ing sound of a foghorn on the misty Forth indicated 
that after all they had not travelled far from their 
natural haunts. 

Autumn still lingered, however, by my lowland burn. 
A dipper skimmed upstream, following its windings ; 
a blackbird rested on the russet thorn ; a cloud of 
lapwings circled overhead ; and a bee buzzed past as if 



THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR 29 

it had forgotten that the next day was the first of 
November. Ah ! if we had more of such days. For- 
give me if I love to string their memories together, and 
wonder whether by and by I may wander among 
green fields and by quiet streams such as this (I could 
dispense with the ice-bound canal), rest in old-world 
churches, and babble about them till the end comes. 

The frost grew keener as the season advanced, until 
we were registering in mid-November twenty to 
twenty-five degrees. Yet these were days of bright 
sunshine, when the golden russet of the beeches con- 
trasted with the deep green of the Scots firs, and the 
thrushes were busy picking at the haws on the thorn, 
still in full leafage. Up on the moor the rime lay 
heavy on the grass, and looking southwards the Novem- 
ber morning sunshine transmuted the upland meadows 
into waves of silver, the gradations being caused by 
the undulating hillocks of tufted bent. The topmost 
twigs of the ash, last year's growth, still held out, and 
the beeches seemed to burn deeper and deeper. Gray 
has a fine ode, " On the pleasure arising from vicissi- 
tude." Our winter memories are full of such vicissi- 
tudes. " Yesterday," he wrote : — 

Yesterday the sullen year 
Saw the snowy whirlwind fly. 

To-day it is melting on the hill-side, and to-morrow ? 

To-morrow ? Why to-morrow I may be 
Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years. 

When, in early December, a brilliant silver sun cast 
a dazzling sheen on the snowclad hill, once more on 



30 THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR 

the southern garden slope the soft, fresh grass suggested 
the spring. Washington Irving noted this character- 
istic of our climate in his delightful word-pictures of 
Christmas at Bracebridge Hall. " Notwithstanding 
the frostiness of the morning, the sun in his cloudless 
journey has acquired sufficient power to melt away the 
thin covering of snow from every southern declivity, 
and to bring out the living green which adorns an 
English landscape even in mid-winter. Large tracts 
of smiling verdure contrasted with the dazzling white- 
ness of the shaded slopes and hollows. . . . There was 
something truly cheering in this triumph of warmth 
and verdure over the frosty thraldom of winter ; it 
was, as the squire observed, an emblem of Christmas 
hospitality." Washington Irving always puts me into 
a pleasant train of thought. Indeed, it was on Christ- 
mas Day, as I wandered along the homeland path 
referred to at the close of the first paper, beneath its 
bare beeches, that Bracebridge Hall came into my 
mind. I longed for a familiar object in the middle 
distance, the old square embattled tower with its 
delicate spire. How in this Scottish bypath I missed - 
its homeliness, missed, too, the nestling vicarage, a 
retreat such as Keble or Dean Hole would have loved, 
clothed in summer with roses and wistaria, and sur- 
rounded with old yews, old larches, old limes. But 
there was no such vista, and even our homely Pent- 
lands looked stern and wild. Suddenly I was attracted 
by the chatter of chaffinches, flocking around some old 
thorn trees by the wayside. They, too, were holding 
their Christmas. They say that at Glastonbury there 
was a thorn once the staff of St. Joseph, that used to 



THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR 31 

blossom at Christmas, but no thorn could equal that 
on which the birds were so busy. Its cluster of coral 
berries glistened in the winter sunshine. Two months 
later the tips of the same thorn were coral red, this 
time with tiny buds, the promise of the spring. 

In the beginning of March, 1910, a few haws, 
memories of autumn like the russet leaves still clinging 
to the beech, lingered on the thorn, beneath which on 
the garden slope the coltsfoot, the violet, and the 
crinkled green leaves of the primrose and cowslip 
linked the autumn with the spring. But the glory of 
the garden, defying the rigour of the year, was the 
mezereon, with its clusters of purple flowers on its 
leafless branches. In the Church's floral kalendar the 
mezereon is associated with the 24th of February, the 
festival of St. Matthias. To many, however, it is better 
known through Cowper's description in his " Winter's 
Walk at Noon." There it is linked with the hypericum 
or St. John's wort, another of the flowers associated 
with saints' days. 

Hypericum all bloom, so thick a swarm 
Of flowers, like flies clothing her slender rods, 
That scarce a leaf appears ; mezereon too, 
Though leafless, well attired, and thick beset 
With blushing wreaths, investing every spray. 

March was certainly on its best behaviour, and the 
sun was breaking through the clouds as I returned to 
the old path. How fair in these early spring days are 
the plumelets of the larch. Green are the thorns, but 
greener the feathery sprays of this deciduous pine, 
when the great trees in the park seem at a distance to 
show no signs of spring's awakening. And yet, sil- 



32 THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR 

houetted against the stronger March light, as com- 
pared with that of the brief November day, there is a 
grace and stateliness about those naked boughs that 
we cannot discern in leafy June. 

Amid the bird music that fills the garden in the 
spring, I was interested to note in the beginning of 
April the apparently persistent proximity of a curlew. 
It seemed as if the spirit of our moorlands and glens 
was haunting the very garden itself. Like Words- 
worth, one was prompted to inquire : — 

Shall I call thee Bird, 
Or but a wandering voice ? 

I was not without some misgiving. The prolonged 
whirling whistle seemed cut short : it had not the 
true " Tibbie Shiels " ring about it. Then I dis- 
covered that one of our starlings on the topmost bough 
of the bare ash tree was endowed with the gift of 
mimicry. He would give us a few of his woodnotes 
wild, unconcernedly prune his wings as if nothing had 
happened, and the next moment he was " wheepling " 
away like a whaup. The rascal kept up the illusion 
long after he was discovered, much to our delight, for 
did he not recall moorland rambles in years gone by, 
angling days among the rivers of the Scottish Border- 
land ? 

The promise of March did not continue, and with 
April, our winter entered its second term. It was 
on a 24th of April a few years ago that we witnessed a 
memorable snowstorm. On that occasion the heavy 
fall rested on the sycamore boughs, clustered round 
the flowers of the elm in tiny balls, and clad the 



THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR 33 

Austrian pines with great white pugnacious-looking 
boxing-gloves. Only the delicate boughs of the beech, 
pointing to the leaden sky, scorned to bear their burden 
of snow, while the larches drooped gracefully under 
their white feathery sprays. Down by the river the 
general effect was as of a hawthorn-bordered stream 
rich with May blossom. Such is an April memory. 
We could not boast a like experience this year, but 
strong winds and low temperatures prolonged the 
rigour of the year. It seemed as if March and April 
had exchanged places. Night after night the ther- 
mometer kept registering a temperature only a few 
degrees above freezing point. " New leaf, new life — 
the days of frost are o'er," wrote Tennyson, but this 
line did not apply to the uncertain glories of April, 
1910. Even the hackneyed quotation from Browning, 
to which I had so often pinned my faith — " Oh, to 
be in England now that April's there " — brought its 
own disillusionment, as in mid- April I rambled by the 
classic Thames, under sunless skies and along wind- 
swept towing-paths. Yet 'twere churlish to grumble 
amid the cowslip meadows of the Isis, with the voice 
of the cuckoo in the coppice and the swallow dipping 
and darting over quiet backwaters as if it were a day in 
June. 

In concluding this paper on the rigour of the year, 
I am conscious that, after all, I have been content to 
record for the most part such of its beauties as appealed 
to me. The stern realities of a hard winter are too 
aggressive to be ignored ; we must take them as they 
come. It is a long cry to last October, and the mem- 
ories of September rambles in Charles Lamb's country 



34 THE RIGOUR OF THE YEAR 

seem like a dream ; but if sometimes winter thaws a 
little and shows a smiling face, we must not be un- 
grateful. In May its rigours are easily forgotten as we 
look forward to the joys of summer. We love to 
remember only the silver-grey sunshine that now and 
again lit the gloom. Walter Pater, in one of his essays, 
recalls how as a child — for doubtless it was himself of 
whom he was writing — he passed one evening a garden 
gate usually closed. That night it stood open ; " and, 
lo ! within, a great red hawthorn in full flower, em- 
bossing heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and 
branches, so aged that there were but few green 
leaves thereon — a plumage of tender, crimson fire out 
of the heart of the dry wood." That passing glimpse 
was never afterwards forgotten ; it haunted his 
dreams — happy dreams ! — as he seemed to loiter along 
magic roadways of crimson flowers. Summer after 
summer as the flowers came on, he thought of the 
blossom of the red hawthorn. So it should be with our 
memories of the past. Let us try to forget the long 
dreary wall that so often circumscribes life's highway, 
shutting out the sunshine ; and to remember only the 
surpassing beauty of that momentary vision through 
the open garden gate. 



IV 
IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 



Guarding in sylvan shades the name of Penn the apostle. 

Longfellow's "Evangeline. 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 



WHEN Charles II insisted on William Penn's 
new territory of Sylvania on the virgin shores 
of America being called Pennsylvania, he coined one 
of the sweetest place-names in colonial history. Unlike 
Boston and Plymouth, and many other historic names 
common to both countries, the name of Pennsylvania 
may not be found on the map of England ; but I love 
to think of the little tableland of beechen woods in 
South Buckinghamshire, extending, say, from Penn 
Village to Jordans and the Chalfonts, and from Amers- 
ham to Stoke Pogis, as the Pennsylvania of England. 
It is a stretch of thickly wooded country, dear to every 
lover of English history and literature. Indeed, the 
literary pilgrim is embarrassed with the richness of 
its associations. You cannot pull up at an old-world 
Bucks village, or pass an old manor-house without 
discovering that here lingers some literary tradition 
or association, as of Shakespeare at Grendon, Milton 
at Chalfont St. Giles and at Horton, Gray and Penn 
at Stoke Pogis, Waller and Burke at Beaconsfield, 
Cowper at Olney, Chesterfield at Eythrope, John 

37 



38 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

Hampden at Hampden, Isaac Disraeli at Bradenham, 
and in our own day Lord Beaconsfield, both at Braden- 
ham and Hughenden. We even find that John Knox 
preached a sermon in the parish church of Amersham 
protesting against the accession of Mary Tudor, 
naturally to him a congenial task. 

South Buckinghamshire is particularly revered by 
every patriotic American as the ancestral home of the 
Penns, and as containing the sacred soil in which the 
great Founder of Pennsylvania was laid to rest after 
his labours. The romance of William Penn is one of 
the most interesting episodes in Caroline history, and, 
as we shall see, reveals a pleasing trait in the characters 
of Charles II and James II that ought not to be over- 
looked. 

From my book-room windows I daily look across 
the Water of Leith to thePentland Hills, while "the 
river at my garden's end " flows on past Scotia's 
capital, only to rest when it reaches the waters of the 
misty Forth. But 

There are hills beyond Pentland and lands beyond Forth 

to the south as well as to the north, and thus it was 
during a glorious September holiday that I feasted 
my eyes every morning on the sunlit Chiltern Hills of 
Buckinghamshire beyond the tiny Thame that flowed 
so gently on to meet the greater river of a still greater 
capital. From an old seventeenth-century farmhouse, 
around which the golden grain had been garnered, I 
rambled into a land of beech-crowned hills, storied 
churches, and ancient Elizabethan manor-houses. Just 
over yon sleepy down-like hills to the south-east, where 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 



39 



at nightfall one can sometimes see the gleam of distant 
lamplit London, lies the Penn-land of England. To 
me it has all the charm of an undiscovered country 
over the hills and far away. For my Penn-land rambles 




A CORNER OF PENN VILLAGE. 



I always started from Amersham, sometimes over the 
hills to Penn itself, now by way of Beaconsfield to 
Stoke Pogis, or at another time by Chalfont St. Giles 
to Jordans. Amersham, I may add, was practically 



40 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

more distant to me at my remote farmhouse among the 
hills than it is to the literary pilgrim who starts from 
London. 

I have frequently praised the lanes of Hertfordshire, 
but they do not surpass those of South Buckingham- 
shire. The road from Amersham to Penn winds 
through beech woods, within which there are signs of 
violets and wood-sorrel, reminiscent of spring. The 
dog-rose, the bracken, and the gorse arc always present, 
and here and there clumps of pines add strength to 
the character of the landscape. On the border of a 
wood I passed the church of the village of Penn Street, 
a modern church with a steeple, unusual in a locality 
where square embattled towers are the rule. It is a 
picturesque village with its little alehouse, " The 
Squirrel," suggestive of beechnuts, and another that 
bears the suggestive name of the " Hit or Miss." 
My path leads me past Penn House, a red-brick man- 
sion-house, all ivy-clad gables and chimneys, one gable 
bearing the date 1536. One of the delights connected 
with rambles in England is that in the most out-of-the- 
way places you stumble across manor-houses that, in 
themselves or on account of the families with which 
they are associated, have become famous in England's 
history. So it is with this old manor-house. The Penns 
became extinct in the elder branch by the death of 
Roger Penn in 1735, when the estate passed by the 
marriage of his sister and heir to Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 
Baronet. Later still, a Curzon married the daughter 
of Admiral Howe, and to this circumstance the present 
family owes its triple name, representing the Penns, 
Curzons, and Howes. With the Penns we are more 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 



4i 



immediately interested. The Howes not only link 
Penn House with the Admiral, but also with General 
Howe, who was with Wolfe at Quebec, and who is 
still better known in connection with the War of 
Independence. 

From Penn Bottom the path ascends to the weather- 
beaten village of Penn itself, on the top of the hill. 




THE TOP OF THE HILL 

The Village Inn, Penn. 



Penn Church is a plain old structure of rubble and 
flint, originally early English in style and dating from 
1 21 3. The chancel, added in 1736, contains the only 
stained-glass window, filled in during the following 
year. This parish church, however, is interesting in 
other memorials of the dead, mural monuments by 



42 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

Chantrey, old hatchments, and ancient brasses. The 
pilgrim who has no access to family archives can here 
muse over the historic names of Penn, Howe, and 
Curzon. It should be stated that William Penn's 
father, Admiral Penn, belonged to a branch of the 
Penn family which removed to Wiltshire. They had 
hived off from the old stock. Admiral Penn himself 
was buried at St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. But the 
old district had a magnetic attraction for his family, 
and thus it happens that some of the grandchildren 
of William Penn are buried here, while his son, Thomas 
Penn of Stoke Pogis, and his descendants are buried in 
the church of the famous Elegy. In the south chancel 
chapel at Penn still remain splendid brasses fixed on 
blue stone. One is a finely cut brass to the memory 
of John Pen of Pen, who died in 1597, aged 63. He 
and his lady are dressed in Elizabethan Court dress. 
Other brasses are dedicated to the memory of a later 
John Pen, his wife Sarah, five sons and five daughters, 
dating from 1641, and to a William Pen and Martha 
his wife, a son, and two daughters, also of the seven- 
teenth century. 

From Penn to Stoke Pogis is only some seven or 
eight miles — nine, perhaps, if you follow the windings 
of the highways and byways of this sylvan country. 
The church and churchyard of Stoke Pogis can never 
be described too often. Throughout the length and 
breadth of England there are many more beautiful 
shrines. One thinks, for example, of the noble chancel 
of the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon, 
where Shakespeare lies : the great and beautiful church 
of St. Mary Redcliffe, in which Admiral Penn was 




PENN CHURCH, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 

In the ancient homeland of the Penns. 



44 IN ENGLAND* S PENNSYLVANIA 

interred ; and the parish church of Berkhampstead just 
across the border into Hertfordshire, where the poet 
Cowper's father was rector, and in the pastoral house 
of which the gentle bard was born. But Gray has 
thrown around this old parish church a spell that is all 
its own. Stoke Pogis has no long-drawn aisles, nor 
fretted vaults, where pealing anthems swell the note 
of praise. Rather has it old-fashioned pews in which 
the Sir Roger de Coverleys of the eighteenth century 
might gently slumber. It was while I was seated in 
Gray's pew that I observed a slab recording the fact 
that in a vault in this church are deposited the remains 
of Thomas Penn of Stoke Park, son of William Penn, 
founder of Pennsylvania. Thomas Penn, it appeared, 
had returned to the bosom of the Church of England. 
He visited Pennsylvania in 1732, and was presented 
with an address by the Assembly. In 1760 he purchased 
Stoke Park. The classic modern mansion was built by 
John Penn, grandson of the great governor, and it 
was he also who erected the monument to Gray in the 
meadow beyond the churchyard. The last of the 
Penns of Stoke was buried at Stoke Pogis in 1869. 
It is pleasing to think that Thomas Penn spent his 
declining years only some six miles distant from the 
sacred spot where rests his illustrious father, beside the 
old Quaker meeting-house among the beechen woods 
of Jordans. 

Situated as I was in North Buckinghamshire, I 
preferred to visit Jordans, not from Stoke Pogis, but 
by way of Chalfont St. Giles, so that I might pass 
Milton's cottage ; for was not John Milton one of the 
links in the chain that bound William Penn to this 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 45 

corner of Buckinghamshire ? My practice in making 
these literary pilgrimages is to find out " the foot- 
path way," and stick to it. In Scotland these paths 
are practically non-existent, and so I appreciate the 
more, the luxury of wandering from village to village 
through the fields. From Amersham to Chalfont the 
footpath is parallel to the King's highway, following 
the course of a lowland stream, a gently flowing, clear- 
bottomed chalk-stream, called the Misbourne, lined 
with water-cress and sedge, Near Stratton Chase I 
passed a mill whose mill-stream was alive with white 
ducks, and from there I obtained my first glimpse of 
the square embattled church tower of Chalfont St. 
Giles. The village consists of a single street of old 
timbered, green-lichened cottages, old-fashioned ale- 
houses and signposts, with the inevitable duck-pond. 
A great elm half-way down the village street looked 
as if it had been an ancient tree even in Milton's time. 
At the church I was so shadowed by an old verger 
that I have but a dim impression of its features, dim 
as the faded frescoes on its walls. In visiting such 
churches the indefinable charm, the holy calm, the 
awe-inspiring beauty vanish entirely when an officious 
official turns the building into a mediaeval museum ; 
but when the door of the porch is open, or when I 
have only to lift the latch of the wire screen intended 
to keep the birds from entering and building their nests 
in the sanctuaries of the Lord, when I may step silently 
and alone to the altar-rails, then I bless the vicar of 
the parish for this sweet solitude, this haven of rest, 
this " haunt of ancient peace." Yet Charles Lamb, in 
that most sympathetic essay on the Quakers, would 



46 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

have it that theirs was the greater peace, the silence of 
communion, spirit with spirit, seated together at their 
meeting-house. " To pace alone," he says, " to pace 
alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, 
time-stricken ... is but a vulgar luxury compared 
with that which those enjoy, who come together for 
the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude." 
I shall return to this charming paper when I come to 
record my visit to Jordans. 

Leaving the churchyard on his way to Jordans, the 
pilgrim must needs pass Milton's cottage on his left 
at the south end of the village of Chalfont St. Giles. 
One room only is open to the public, but in that room 
I could sit undisturbed and think of him who was 
the great Puritan poet of England, and at the same 
time the poet, next to Shakespeare and Spenser, whose 
works glow with all the richness of the Elizabethans, 
fifty years after their time. There is little to distin- 
guish Milton's cottage from many another in the 
district, but it must have been a delightful retreat from 
the plague-haunted metropolis. Milton knew the 
lanes of Buckinghamshire. They had already inspired 
his verse when, as a young man at Horton, some thirteen 
miles distant, he wrote his U Allegro and II Penseroso, 
and so when Ellwood the Quaker took the " pretty box 
for him in Giles Chalfont," Milton was doubtless re- 
visiting familiar ground in the best of company, 
familiar, and yet with this terrible difference, that to 
him, like his own Samson, the sun was now " dark and 
silent as the Moon when she deserts the night." The 
faithful Ellwood lived close at hand, the Penningtons 
occupied Chalfont Grange, and with them dwelt the 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 47 

beautiful Gulielma Maria Springett, daughter of Sir 
William Springett, whose widow had married Isaac 
Pennington. It was into this charming circle that young 
William Penn entered and there met his future wife. 
Hepworth Dixon in his picturesque way has happily 
described the scene in his biography of Penn. 

" Guli was fond of music. Music was Milton's 
second passion. In the cottage of the poet, in the 
Grange of the philosopher, how one can fancy the 
hours flying past between psalms of love, high con- 
verse from the lips of the inspired bard, old stories of 
the Revolution in which the elder people had each 
had a prominent share, and probably the recitation of 
favourite passages from that stupendous work which 
was to crown the blind and aged poet, and become one 
of the grandest heirlooms of mankind ! It was to 
these favoured friends that Milton first made known 
that he had been engaged in writing Paradise Lost ; 
and it was also in their society that Ellwood suggested 
to him the theme of his Paradise Regained. Immortal 
Chalfont ! " 

As you enter the low-roofed room with its great 
cross-beam, you wonder how much of the old 
atmosphere is left, the atmosphere of the dainty 
Priscilla, for Guli belonged to the same charming 
sisterhood as LongfeHow's ancestress. The porch 
had gone, but you can look out from Milton's 
latticed window into the little garden beyond. At 
the back of the iron grate, in the great open fire- 
place, a Scottish thistle, oddly enough, is the chief 
ornament. A few Chippendale chairs, small oak stools, 
a table and bookcase containing various editions of 



48 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

Milton's works, and other Miltoniana, constitute the 
furnishings of the Poet's Room at the present day. A 
small book-closet oil this room, with its tiny window 
and shelves contemporary with the age of the cottage, 
seems somehow to suggest more of the poet than the 
well-kept little museum. What books were stored on 
those shelves would be an interesting speculation. 
How eagerly we would scan their titles if we could, 
just as in a later age the literary pilgrim to Abbotsford, 
in passing through the library and study, loves to run 
his or her eyes along the screened bookshelves and to 
identify here and there the old " classics " from which 
in his " Notes " the good Sir Walter used to quote so 
copiously. But to return. One loves to think that 
Guli (or should we not say " Miss Springett " ?) some- 
times sat in this room, waiting perhaps until young 
William Penn called to escort her back to the Grange. 
All this is so delightfully English that we would fain 
forget the other side of the story, the cruel persecu- 
tions that were helping to drain Old England of its 
best blood and to build up a New England across the 
Atlantic. Leaving the cottage, I lingered for a moment 
in the little garden in which grapes and tomatoes 
ripened in the warm September sunshine, amid the 
resplendent autumnal glories of sunflowers, asters, and 
dahlias. 



II 



JORDANS AND WILLIAM PENN 

To the memories of Perm, Stoke Pogis, and Chalfont, 
I was now to add that of Jordans, the innermost 
sanctuary, shall I say, of England's Pennsylvania. 
The earlier Penns are sleeping beneath their Eliza- 
bethan memorials in old Penn Church ; the later 
Penns, Squires of Stoke Park, built themselves a lordly 
manor-house and sought to share with the poet Gray 
the immortality of Stoke Pogis ; but Jordans differs 
from either. As a shrine, it is unique in its simplicity, 
this little meeting-house and burying-ground with its 
plain headstones. Yet here rests William Penn, " the 
apostle," as Longfellow lovingly calls him ; here too 
rests Guli Penn, here also the gentle Ellwood to whom 
the Friends owe this burying-ground, the persecuted 
Penningtons, and all that goodly company of heroes 
and heroines, martyrs in the cause of truth and peace. 

Leaving Chalfont St. Giles, the road winds past old 
farmhouses whose roofs, in relief against the sky, curve 
like switchbacks. These wonderful lanes with their 
high hedges are still my companions. Here is one of 
holly, gay with clusters of berries, reminding one in 
these late autumn days that Christmastide is not so 
very far off ; and now the road widens out into sun- 
bathed grassy open spaces decked with bracken and 
E 49 



So IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

with the last of the trailing bridal-like garlands of wild 
clematis, so happily named " traveller's-joy." Beyond 
the hedgerows, as usual in this pleasant land, the land- 
scape is bounded by the glorious vista of woods. 

Suddenly, on my left, as I descended into a cuplike 
hollow in this tableland, I came upon the historic 
meeting-house. There was no mistaking it, a plain 
old-fashioned building embosomed in beech woods, 
lonely save for Jordans farmhouse, which I had just 
passed. Owing to the fall in the ground, there was 
ample stabling accommodation underneath the meet- 
ing-house for the Friends, who, in those seventeenth- 
and eighteenth-century days, must perforce ride many 
a long mile before they could reach this secluded spot. 
It was not so long since there was not a single head- 
stone in this primitive burying-ground. From 1671 the 
Quakers slept in nameless graves. Penn's biographer, 
Dixon, says that when he visited Jordans in 1851 with 
Granville Penn,the great-grandson of the state founder, 
they had some difficulty in identifying the particular 
spot " where heaves the turf " over his sacred remains. 
Mr. Dixon adds that Granville Penn " is disposed to 
mark the spot by some simple but durable record — a 
plain stone or block of granite ; and if this be not done, 
the neglect will only hasten the day on which his 
ancestor's remains will be carried off to America — 
their proper and inevitable home ! "* Twelve years 
later, at the heads of such graves as had been identified 

1 In 1 88 1 and again in 1909 proposals were made to remove the 
remains of Penn to the United States, but the negotiations fortunately 
proved unsuccessful. Long may the remains of one of England's 
noblest sons rest in hallowed English ground. 










r^Vu, 



JORDANS BURYING-GROUND : 

The innermost sanctuary of England's Pennsylvania t 



52 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

were placed the simple memorial stones, with name and 
date of burial only, that we see to-day. Penn still rests 
at Jordans. Made welcome by the kindly caretaker, I 
lingered long in the old meeting-room, poring over 
the old-world names recorded on its walls. These names 
included a list of some 385 burials between 1671 and 
1845. The first entry I looked for read as follows : — 

" Penn, William, Esquire, 171 8, the illustrious 
founder of Pennsylvania, died at his residence at Rus- 
combe, near Twyford, Berks, 4th day [Wednesday] 
30th of 5th mo. [July] 1 71 8 aged 74, buried at Jordans, 
3rd day [Tuesday] 5th of 6th mo. [August] 171 8 when 
some 30 Quaker ministers attended the funeral in- 
cluding Thomas Story and a vast concourse of Friends 
and others." 

Story was the faithful friend of his latter years. 
Gulielma's name was recorded under date 1693. Our 
gentle Guli had died at the age of 50, " one of ten 
thousand," broken in spirit. Weary and heavy-laden, 
the sorrows of her husband, which she insisted in 
sharing, had brought her to a premature grave. Too 
well had she lived up to Penn's own ideal of a perfect 
wife, " a friend, a companion, a second self, one that 
bears an equal share with thee in all thy toils and 
troubles." At least two other Gulielmas are inscribed 
on the roll at Jordans, one a daughter who died in 
1689, and the other a Gulielma Pitt who died in 1746. 
The names of the Penningtons and Ellwoods complete 
the revered circle that sat around John Milton in the 
old Chalfont days. Less-known names are the 
Zacharys, and the Lovelaces, surely more Cavalier than 
Quaker ; and as illustrating the seventeenth- and 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 53 

eighteenth-century fashion of adopting the old Hebrew 
nomenclature, I could not refrain from noting the 
record of the burials of the Sutterfield family, of 
Abraham and Rebecca Sutterfield, whose children had 
been named respectively Joshua, Luke, Abiah, Kezia, 
Jacob, and Luke (the second of the name). Rebecca 
Sutterfield ! How Hawthorne could have woven a 
Puritan romance around such a name ! 

" Every Quakeress," says Charles Lamb, " is a lily ; 
and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun- 
conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the 
Metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, 
they show like troops of the Shining Ones." So 
thought our most beloved of English essayists as he 
met them amid the bustle of London ; but Jordans, 
though so near the metropolis, reckoned by miles — 
some twenty or thereabout — is yet " far from the 
madding crowd," and, as you rest on one of the homely 
benches of the meeting-house, you cannot but feel 
how charmingly Lamb interpreted the undefinable 
glamourie of this place. " You go away with a sermon 
not made with hands . . . you have bathed with still- 
ness. O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to 
sickness of the j anglings, and nonsense-noises of the 
world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat 
yourself, for a quiet half-hour, upon some undisputed 
corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers ! " 
Reader, if thou wouldst experience this peace, a peace 
that truly and literally passeth understanding, make a 
pilgrimage to Jordans. 

Nothing could be more striking than the contrast 
between the career of William Penn and this his last 



54 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

resting-place. The story of his life is, to a great extent, 
the history of the later Stuart period. It was full of 
contrasts. Penn played many parts. He combined 
the man of thought, the idealist, the poet, with the 
man of action. The son of one of England's greatest 
admirals (for Sir William Penn's services to his country 
have never had full justice done to them), the founder 
of a great colony, the patrician, courtier, personal 
friend of King James II, William Penn was yet withal 
a man who, through all his long career as leader and 
protector of the Quakers, never ceased to be per- 
secuted for righteousness' sake, a man who often had 
no certain dwelling-place save the prison-house. How 
very human were the relations between father and son ! 
Admiral Sir William Penn (we cannot call him the 
old admiral, for he died after a full and strenuous life 
at the age of forty-nine) had built up hopes of a brilliant 
future for his son. William, however, was a serious- 
minded youth, somewhat of a visionary. At fifteen, 
he was entered as a gentleman commoner at Christ 
Church, Oxford ; but the spell fell upon him early in 
life, and when Charles II in 1660 ordered that surplices 
should once more be worn at divine service, young 
Penn, joined by some kindred spirits, attacked the 
surpliced students, and tore the prelatic vestments 
over their heads. Oxford, however, was not Edin- 
burgh, nor Penn a Jenny Geddes, and so, instead of 
another revolution, all that happened was that the 
admiral's young hopeful was expelled from college. 
A mere matter of temperament, some will say, but it 
hurt Sir William to the quick. Contrast the feeling of 
Sir Thomas Browne, for example, who rejoiced " to 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA SS 

see the return of the comely Anglican order in old 
Episcopal Norwich." 

Sir William next sent his son to France. He re- 
turned, 'tis true, with the polished manners of a 
gentleman, but his mind was made up, and, to his 
father's great grief, it was not long before young Penn 
decided to throw preferment to the winds and to 
link his fortunes with that humble sect the Quakers. 
Notwithstanding his ultra-Puritanism, he retained the 
distinguished manners of a cavalier, or of what was 
then called " a gentleman of quality." Samuel Pepys 
thus notes his return from France : " Mr. Pen, Sir 
William's son, is come back from France, and come to 
visit my wife ; a most modish person grown, she says, 
a fine gentleman." Pepys, who missed nothing, 
noticed that there was something wrong between the 
admiral and his son. " All things, I fear, do not go 
well with them. They look discontentedly, but I 
know not what ails them." Later, he understood that 
there were religious differences " which I now per- 
ceive is one thing that hath put Sir William so long off 
the hookes." At last the secret is out. Writing in his 
diary under date December 29th, 1667, Pepys says, 
" At night comes Mrs. Turner to see us ; and there, 
among other talk, she tells me that Mr. William Pen, 
who is lately come from Ireland, is a Quaker again, 
or some very melancholy thing ; that he cares for no 
company, nor comes into any, which is a pleasant thing, 
after his being abroad so long." It was said that the 
admiral was to have been raised to the peerage; and well 
he deserved the honour, but William was his heir, and 
theQuaker would have no such" worldly title or patent." 



56 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

We are glad to know that father and son were recon- 
ciled before Sir William's death, and that, knowing 
the perils with which young Penn would be beset in 
an age that could not tolerate dissent, the admiral on 
his deathbed asked the Duke of York to protect his 
son so far as he consistently could. The Duke, it will 
be remembered, was Lord High Admiral, while Sir 
William was Vice-Admiral of England ; hence the 
bond of friendship between these two men, that never 
was broken. How faithfully James carried out the 
dying man's request is now a matter of history. In- [ 
deed, the intimacy between Charles II, James II, and 
the Penns, father and son, is one of the most pleasing 
episodes in their annals. No one can say that William 
Penn had not the courage of his convictions. What \ 
he said, he said ; and to know that the last of the 
Stuart kings were faithful friends of Penn the Quaker 
reveals a trait of character in these two men that 
should not be forgotten. But while Penn's access to 
the royal presence enabled him to do much towards 
softening the sufferings of the persecuted Quakers, it 
was the cause of his own later troubles, when over and 
over again the cry arose that Penn was a Papist and 
Jesuit. 

I have already referred to the naming of Pennsyl- 
vania by Charles II, after the admiral. More interest- 
ing, too, than any romance is the history of that settle- 
ment. Well might Penn exclaim, as he does, in one 
of his letters, " Oh, how sweet is the quiet of these 
parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicita- 
tions, hurries, and perplexities of woeful Europe ! " 
Sweet indeed ! to be away from the bigotry of the 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 57 

old world, a world that could not distinguish between 
Quakers and Papists, a world that could accuse the 
man who tore the surplices at Oxford of being a Jesuit ! 
Nothing illustrates more strikingly Penn's extraordi- 
nary versatility and manifold gifts, than his wonderful 
letter to the Free Society of Traders of Pennsylvania, 
dated August 16th, 1683, in which he describes the 
fertility of his own province, the serenity of its climate, 
its natural resources, its fauna, and the nobility of its 
aboriginal inhabitants. When he leaves again for Eng- 
land in 1684, it is thus he apostrophises Philadelphia : 

" And thou Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of 
this province, named before thou wert born, what love, 
what care, what service, and what travail, has there 
been to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such 
as would abuse and defile thee ! " 

" Oh, that thou mayest be kept from the evil that 
would overwhelm thee ; that faithful to the God of 
thy mercies, in the life of righteousness thou mayest 
be preserved to the end ! My soul prays to God for 
thee, that thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that 
thy children may be blessed of the Lord, and thy 
people saved by His power. My love to thee has been 
great, and the remembrance of thee affects my heart 
and mine eye. — The God of eternal strength keep 
and preserve thee to His glory and peace." 

How we seem to see in these lines the workings of 
Penn's mind ! In seeking to give written expression 
to his feelings towards Philadelphia, Penn models his 
apostrophe on the words of the Master Himself. 
Knowing the character of the man, there can be no 
doubt as to his sincerity. 



58 IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 

Over and over again the great colonist longed to 
return to his retreat at Pennsbury, Pennsylvania, and 
was as often prevented by arrestments on the old 
charges, and so it was not until 1699 tnat ne ma de his 
second voyage. He returned to England in 1701, in 
connection with proposed changes in the government 







" I pass through Amersham once more." 

of North America. Penn never saw his colony again. 
Troubles at home, that told on his health, showered 
fast upon him. In 171 2 he was seized with apoplectic 
fits, and on July 30th, 171 8, he died, as the memorial on 
the wall there shows, and left behind him an imperish- 
able name. 

But I have lingered all too long at Jordans, too long 
at least for a September day, if I wish to be home 
before nightfall. In the gloaming, as I pass through 
Amersham once more, a single bell is tolling for even- 
song, and very impressive the parish church looks with 



IN ENGLAND'S PENNSYLVANIA 59 

its chance] only alight. I cannot remain to the service, 
for I have still to retrace my steps to the distant farm- 
house among the hills. It was a peaceful impression 
that I carried away with me. The song of the aged 
Simeon, so appropriately incorporated in the Order for 
Evening Prayer in that time-hallowed liturgy, seemed 
somehow to become associated in my mind with the 
passing of William Penn. During his lifetime the 
Quakers had experienced their de profundis. They had 
sounded the depths. They had passed through the 
valley. They were now climbing the sunny side of the 
hill, on whose slopes Charles Lamb saw" the Shining 
Ones " ; and so in 171 8 their apostle also might now 
depart in peace, for his eyes had seen their salvation 
prepared " before the face of all people." 



V 
STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 



Hark ! how the sacred calm that breathes around, 
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease ; 

In still small accents whispering from the ground, 
A grateful earnest of eternal peace. 

Gray's "Elegy." 

[One of the stanzas omitted by the poet in his final version of 
the Elegy.] 



STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 

ONE of the wishes of a lifetime was realised on a 
bright September day when I stood by the side 
of Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis churchyard. In the 
preceding paper I described my pilgrim's way, first 
from the old market town of Amersham to Penn vil- 
lage, and again from Amersham to Chalfont St. Giles. 
Once more I start from Amersham, and again my route 
is one long lane, garlanded with every variety of 
autumnal luxuriance, hedges decked with dog-roses, 
sloes, gorse, broom, and heather. At one place the 
gorse and broom were both in bloom together, even a 
spray or two of honeysuckle still blossomed in this 
wonderful lane, and everywhere beyond the hedge- 
rows the horizon seemed bounded by beech woods. 
At another delightful spot four roads met, and the 
ancient finger-posts pointed respectively to Amersham, 
Chalfont, Beaconsfield, and Penn. Memories of by- 
gone centuries thus linger in the very finger-posts. 

Crossing the Oxford road at Beaconsfield, I passed 
its grand old church. A few years ago a memorial con- 
taining a medallion portrait of Edmund Burke, 
" patriot, orator, statesman," was placed within the 
church ; and in the churchyard a pyramidal tomb of 
white-and-black marble situated under a great walnut 
tree marks the spot where Edmund Waller was buried. 

63 



64 STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 

During his long life, from 1605 to 1687, he played 
many parts, too many parts perhaps. Here, however, 
we would only think of him as a poet — ■ 

Qui inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps, 

to quote from the inscription on his monument. Both 
Burke and Waller would each require a paper to him- 
self, and so I resume my journey, skirting the famous 
IJurnham Beeches, until I reach " the rugged elms " 
that encircle the churchyard of the Elegy. 

All around are parks surrounding the manors of 
Stoke Park, Stoke Court, and Stoke Place, but when 
the pilgrim follows the pathway to the lichgate, and 
walks up the avenue of cypresses and yews, he feels 
that its modern marble monuments, and the very care 
with which the churchyard is tended, detract some- 
what from its rural simplicity. But rural it still is in 
other respects. The great yew near the venerable 
porch remains, supported in its old age by poles. The 
church tower is still mantled with ivy, and the exterior 
of the church, partly built of rubble and flint and 
partly of ancient brick, and roofed with red lichen- 
crusted tiles, has a time-consecrated look worthy of the 
Elegy. Here there are not even the country sounds 
that we associate with the smallest hamlet, for hamlet 
there is none close to Stoke Pogis. The church and 
churchyard, as often happens, are situated close to the 
remains of the old manor-house that has been super- 
seded by the great white-domed classic building, in the 
deer park, dating from 1799. The scene of the Elegy 
is thus entirely isolated, and surrounded by trees, some 
of them Scots firs. No sound save their melancholy 



STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 6s 

wail can reach this spot, unless, perhaps, the curfew 
when it " tolls the knell of parting day," the flute-like 
tremolo of the owl, or the woodlark's " farewell song." 
A keen observer of nature, as his letters show, Gray 
noted the exact day in the year when he first heard 
the song of the chaffinch or the thrush, the skylark or 
the nightingale, and for him, too, " the meanest flower 
that blows " could give thoughts that often lay " too 
deep for tears." Indeed, he anticipates Wordsworth 
in his lines : — 

The meanest flowret of the vale, 
The simplest note that swells the gale, 
The common sun, the air, the skies, 
To him are opening Paradise. 

Gray's permanent residence was at Cambridge, a de- 
light of a place, he writes, when there is nobody in it ; 
but he spent the vacations at Stoke Court, the home 
of his widowed mother and his aunt, Miss Antrobus, 
and when they died they were buried in the plain brick 
tomb with the blue slab that afterwards became his 
own last resting-place. You can still read the inscription 
to his mother, Dorothy Gray, surely one of the 
sweetest of names, " the tender mother of many chil- 
dren, one of whom had the misfortune to survive her." 
(How these words remind me of Cowper !) Gray's 
mother died in 1753, aged sixty-seven. Thomas Gray, 
her son, had " survived " her eighteen years when he 
died in 1771, aged fifty-five. But Gray's connection 
with the district dates as early as 1737, at least, when, 
as a young man of twenty-one, we find him writing a 
vivacious letter to his life-long friend, Horace Walpole, 
describing his life at Burnham, where his mother's 
f 65 



66 STOKE POG1S AND THOMAS GRAY 

brother, Robert Antrobus, resided. Very happy is the 
description of his uncle Robert, who is " a great hunter, 
in imagination," and whose dogs " take up every chair 
in the house," so that Gray is forced to stand as he 
writes his letter, doubtless a humorous exaggeration. 
Poor Antrobus ! The gout prevents his riding to 
hounds, and so he regales his ears with their " comfort- 
able noise " — the music of the pack — at home, while 
he denounces his nephew for walking when he should 
ride, and reading when he should hunt. 

" My comfort amidst all this is, that I have at the 
distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest 
(the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as 
good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. 
It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices ; moun- 
tains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the 
clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover 
cliff ; but just such hills as people who love their necks 
as well as I do may venture to climb, and crags that 
give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more 
dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most 
venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, 
that, like most other ancient people, are always dream- 
ing out their old stories to the winds. 

" At the foot of one of these squats ME I (il -pen- 
seroso) and there grow to the trunk for a whole morn- 
ing. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol 
around me like Adam in Paradise, before he had an 
Eve ; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I 
commonly do there." 

One could go on quoting from Gray's letters. He 
had not yet seen the Alps nor the Scottish Highlands, 



STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 67 

of the charm of which he wrote so enthusiastically 
twenty years after " The Forty-Five " ; and so his 
reference to Dover Cliff is evidently reminiscent of 
King Lear. Very pleasing, too, is his picture of the 
Burnham Beeches " dreaming out their old stories to 
the winds." They are dreaming still. Some thirty- 
four years later Horace Walpole, to whom the above 
letter was addressed, wrote of him that " Humour was 
his natural and original turn ; and though from his 
childhood he was grave and reserved, his genius led 
him to see things ludicrously and satirically." Here is 
another example from a letter written at Stoke in 1754 
to his friend Wharton : " I take it ill you should say 
anything against the Mole. It is a reflection, I see, 
cast at the Thames. Do you think that rivers which 
have lived in London and its neighbourhood all their 
days, will run roaring and tumbling about, like your 
Tramontane torrents in the north ? No, they only 
glide and whisper." One is reminded here of the first 
stanza of his Progress of Poetry, familiar to all musical 
folks as the well-known glee Awake, Molian lyre. You 
remember the short largo passage in which the com- 
poser Danby interprets Gray's couplet : — 

Now the rich stream of music winds along, 
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, 

just like the poet's own river Thames. Few men, 
indeed, in the eighteenth century had a finer taste in 
music than Thomas Gray, and though linked to Stoke 
Pogis by the most sacred ties, no one more than he was 
capable of appreciating the beauty and dignity of the 



68 STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 

more ornate ritual of our English cathedrals and many 
of our churches, 

Where through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault 
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. 

" My studies," he says in a letter to Dr. Wharton 
in 1758, " lie among the cathedrals, and the tombs, 
and the ruins. To think, though to little purpose, has 
been the chief amusement of my days ; and when I 
would not or cannot think, I dream." 

Stoke Church, however, is a simple parish church in 
a country churchyard, where the Puritan element 
stamped its prevailing character. The men of Buck- 
inghamshire only a century before had been in the 
thick of the Civil War, and when Gray wished to 
typify the rude forefathers of the hamlet, he pictured 
" some village Hampden," some " mute, inglorious 
Milton," " some Cromwell guiltless of his country's 
blood," names not merely associated with the history 
of the county, but with the period of the Puritan 
struggle. The Puritan tradition has lingered long in 
the parish. Even the squire at the manor in Gray's 
time belonged, as we have seen, to the Penn family. 

The interior of Stoke Church is in keeping with this 
tradition. It still contains an ugly gallery in the south 
side of the chancel, and on the north side a room like 
a private box in a theatre, containing a row of Queen 
Anne chairs — the Penn chairs they are called — for the 
occupants for the time being of the manor-house, who 
enter direct from Stoke Park by a private corridor of 
modern Gothic work. How long will these survivals 
of feudalism remain in our country churches — " taber- 



STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 69 

nacles with rings and curtains to them," as Bishop 
Corbet ironically described such box pews so long ago 
as the time of Charles I ? If there is one place 
where all men are equal without respect of persons, 
surely it is in the House of God, and those who love 
our beautiful pre-Reformation churches cannot be too 
grateful that among the satisfactory, if incidental, 
results of the Oxford Movement have been the sweep- 
ing away of the ugly galleries and high square, pews in 
so many places, and the restoration of the custom of 
" the open door " on week days, giving facilities for 
private meditation, a privilege of which the antiquary 
and ecclesiologist are not slow to take reverent advan- 
tage. Gray's pew is still pointed out, a back seat 
(characteristic of his retiring disposition) in the ex- 
treme south-west corner of the nave, and above it there 
is the mural slab recording that in a vault are deposited 
the remains of Thomas Penn of Stoke Park, son of 
William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. Thomas Penn 
was a life-long contemporary of the poet himself. It 
was a later Penn who, in 1799, erected the well-known 
cenotaph to Gray's memory in the adjoining park. 
Through this connection Stoke is linked with the old 
Quaker meeting-house and resting-place at Jordans, 
only some six miles off, hidden away amid beechen 
woods, 

Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap 

over the nameless graves of generations of those early 
Quakers who in troublous times resembled much the 
Scottish Covenanters. 

The more one reads of Gray, the more one loves 



70 STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 

him. He was always buried among his books, for he 
was one of the most deeply read men of his time. 
Would that he had written more than he did. Matthew 
Arnold, in a fine appreciation of Gray, uses as his text 
a remark of the Master of Pembroke Hall, Gray's 
friend and executor, written a fortnight after the 
poet's death :— 

" Everything is now dark and melancholy in Mr. 
Gray's room, not a trace of him remains there ; it 
looks as if it had been for some time uninhabited, and 
the room bespoke for another inhabitant. The 
thoughts I have of him will last, and will be useful to 
me the few years I can expect to live. He never spoke 
out, but I believe, from some little expressions I now 
remember to have dropped from him, that for some 
time past he thought himself nearer his end than those 
about him apprehended." 

He never spoke out, " In these four words," says 
Arnold, " is contained the whole history of Gray's life 
as a man and as a poet." We do not love him the less 
because " he never spoke out," rather do our hearts 
warm to him the more. We love him as we love 
William Cowper, and in a lesser degree William Shen- 
stone. There was something of the same temperament, 
too, in the author of The Christian Tear. Keble's 
humility, said Cardinal Newman, was of an almost 
morbid character. How the sensitive minds of such 
poets as Gray, Cowper, and Keble recoil from 
the Sir Oracles, taken at their own estimate by a 
careless public, who are apt to confound mere 
truculence with force of character. It is hard some- 
times to refrain from kicking against the pricks occa- 



STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 71 

sionally, even the pin-pricks, hard, indeed, not to 
speak out sometimes. When Sir Oracle, with his 
" big bulk of boisterous bombast," gives instruc- 
tions that when he opens his mouth " let no dog 
bark," it is not in human nature to muzzle your 
terrier ; or when Dogberry, " drest in a little brief 
authority," implores you to write him down an ass, it 
requires some restraint not to comply with his wishes. 
" Modest doubt is the beacon of the wise," says 
Shakespeare in another passage ; but Gray, perhaps, 
had too much modest doubt. He liked to write. He 
liked himself better when he did write. Instead, he 
read and read and read, and English literature to-day 
is the poorer because Thomas Gray did not speak out, 
not after the manner of a Sir Oracle or Dogberry, 

One whom the music of his own sweet voice 
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony, 

but out of the rich stores of his encyclopaedic mind. 
In his own delicately humorous, self-depreciatory way 
Gray could, however, write to a friend : 

" At present I feel myself able to write a catalogue, 
or to read the peerage book, or Miller's Gardening 
Dictionary, and am thankful that there are such em- 
ployments and such authors in the world. Some 
people, who hold me cheap for this, are doing perhaps 
what is not half so well worth while. As to posterity, 
I may ask (with somebody whom I have forgotten), 
What has it done to oblige me ? " 

Like many other retiring men, Gray had a genius 
for friendship. Those who were so honoured, wor- 
shipped him, and when " the inevitable hour " came 



72 STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 

no one was more fitted than he to comfort the sorrow- 
ing in their day of trouble. When we read the letters 
that he wrote on such occasions, we are grateful that 
in the eighteenth century people did write letters and 
that their friends preserved them. The spirit of the 
Elegy breathes through them all. Sometimes you 
wonder what his thoughts were seated in that back 
pew in Stoke Church. The beautiful liturgy of the 
Established Church, conserving all that was best in 
devotional literature, had remained practically the 
same for centuries sacred as the sacred shrine itself. 
It was otherwise with the sermon that too often re- 
flected the fashion of the time or the idiosyncrasies of 
the preacher, and so we find Gray confessing to his 
friend Mason, himself a dignitary of York, that " I have 
long thought of reading Jeremy Taylor, for I am per- 
suaded that chopping logic in the pulpit, as our divines 
have done since the Revolution, is not the thing." 
The good Bishop was indeed a man after Gray's own 
heart. Both had the same intimate knowledge of the 
Classics. Both in their time had the same love of 
Nature that marked them out from their contempo- 
raries. The man who could point a moral or illustrate 
a Divine truth in " the descending pearls of a misty 
morning," in the shining beauty of a dove's neck, in 
the image of a rainbow, in the struggle of a skylark to 
reach the empyrean until it " did rise and sing as if it 
had learned music and motion from an angel as he 
passed sometimes through the air about his ministries 
here below," such a kindred spirit was more likely to 
appeal to Gray than the divine who merely chopped 
logic. 



STOKE POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 73 

But I must draw these rambling musings to a close. 
It is difficult to tear oneself away from Stoke Pogis. 
I know as I retrace my steps through the lichgate 
into the meadow that the trees will hide the church- 
yard from me, perhaps for ever, and I " cast one long- 
ing, lingering look behind." This quotation brings me 
back to the Elegy once more. The poem is never far 
from my thoughts. It knows no limitations of time 
nor place. It is as fresh to-day in the twentieth century 
as it was in the eighteenth. In one of his lines Gray 
uses the expression " the rod of empire." The Elegy 
became an " empire " poem on the 12th of September, 
1759, when on that ever-memorable occasion General 
Wolfe recited the poem the night before his great and 
fateful victory on the heights above Quebec. 



VI 
THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 



At the foot of the Berkshire Downs (Chiltern Hills), and itself on 
a gentle elevation, there is an old hall with gable ends and lattice 
windows, standing in grounds which once were stately, and where there 
are yet glade-like terraces of yew trees, which give an air of dignity to 
a neglected scene. . . . Behind the hall and its enclosure the country 
was common land, but picturesque. It had once been a beech forest, 
and though the timber had greatly cleared, the green land was still 
occasionally dotted, sometimes with groups, and sometimes with single 
trees, while the juniper which here abounded, and rose to a great 
height, gave a rich wildness to the scene, and sustained its forest 
character. — Be aeons fields " Endymion." 



THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 

ON one particular September morning my foot- 
steps were bent towards the tiny hamlet of 
Bradenham, for Bradenham and Hughenden, the 
homeland of the Disraelis, are both, as we have seen, 
in Buckinghamshire. " There's no place like Braden- 
ham," wrote the impressionable youth of twenty-six 
who left his " beloved and beechy Bucks " for a tour 
in the Mediterranean in the summer of 1830. Fifty 
years later, when he had become our greatest Foreign 
Minister since the days of Chatham, and after he had 
restored Great Britain to her paramount place among 
the nations, he retired to his study to record his 
memories of the past in fictional form, to live over 
again the old Reform Bill days, and what a past, what 
memories ! The result was Endymion — that brilliant 
and fascinating combination of fiction, history, and 
autobiography, all in one — the rural scenes of which, 
it is needless to add, were laid in Bradenham, the 
home of his youth. 

It was about eleven o'clock when I reached the 
sleepy old village of West Wycombe, surrounded on all 
sides by beech-clad hills, and situated on the Oxford 
road about thirty-two miles from London. As a great 
highway its glory hath departed, and the old coaching 
inns — "The George and Dragon," " The White Swan," 

77 



78 THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 

" The Nag's Head " — seemed almost like silent memo- 
rials of the old joys of the road. Even the eighteenth- 
century church on the hill, with its closed doors and 
grass-grown approach, has a decayed air about it, while 
the great classic mausoleum of the Despencers has an 
equally depressing effect. But Nature herself is ever 
young. The grand old yews that flank the hill-side 
still remain, and bluebells and wild thyme grow on the 
grassy slope. From West Wycombe Church the path 
to Bradenham leads to a beech wood, and, as I enter, I 
hear the gentle swish of a passing shower of rain upon 
the topmost boughs, a grateful sound after leaving the 
dusty motor-haunted highway. Now the sun breaks 
forth again, and turns last year's fallen beech leaves 
into russet and red gold, relieved by the delicate green 
of the wood sorrel, the wood violet, the wild straw- 
berry, and Disraeli's own native primroses. This must 
be a delightful walk in the springtime. Beyond the 
wood and on the opposite slope I have my first glimpse 
of Bradenham village. The harvest is gathered in and 
stacked in the farmyard at my feet, and yonder across 
the railway line lies the hamlet, with the tower of the 
church and the red walls of the vicarage nestling among 
the trees, and bathed in sunshine, while the heights 
behind are still fringed with beechen woods. 

Bradenham Church is a small building with a square 
tower of the prevailing Buckinghamshire type, and 
consists of a simple chancel and nave, with perpen- 
dicular Gothic east and west windows, and a fine, 
richly moulded south doorway of early Norman work. 
On the north side of the chancel there is a chantry 
chapel, erected by Lord Windsor in 1542, and here a 



THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 79 

small mural tablet bears the inscription : " Sacred to 
the memories of Isaac Disraeli, Esquire, D.C.L., of 
Bradenham House, author of Curiosities of Literature, 
who died January 19, 1848, in his 82d year ; and of 
his wife, Maria, to whom he was united for forty-five 
years. She died April 21, 1847, in the 72d year of her 
age." Other memorials there are more stately, per- 
haps, but this is the one that interests the literary 
pilgrim of to-day — the last resting-place of Disraeli the 
elder. As I leave the chantry chapel I observe high up 
on its walls two old heraldic hatchments ; the one 
bears the motto "Mors Janua Vitce" and the other 
has for its legend the single word "Resurgam " — for a 
single word, perhaps, the most pregnant with meaning 
of any word in the whole vocabulary of the human 
race. 

Only the garden wall divides the churchyard from 
the home of the Disraelis, a plain but stately manor, 
looking west and south across the valley to the hills 
beyond, and sheltered from the east and north by its 
overhanging woods — an ideal abode for a literary re- 
cluse like Isaac Disraeli. Beneath its cedars and amid 
its avenues of box and yew Queen Elizabeth was enter- 
tained by Lord Windsor on her way to Oxford in 1566. 
In 1877 another great Queen might have done the 
manor a similar honour, but Fate ruled otherwise. 
Circumstances prevented the permanent acquisition 
of Bradenham by Isaac Disraeli, who consequently 
purchased the neighbouring estate of Hughenden, and 
thus in after years Queen Victoria's visit was not to 
Bradenham, but over the hills to Hughenden. Follow- 
ing the fortunes of the family, I, too, went over the 



80 THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 

hills to Hughenden by a pathway which Lord Beacons- 
field never forgot — a pathway skirting the manor- 
house, and gay with bracken, foxgloves, juniper, and 
heather. The first heather I plucked this year grew 
on a Buckinghamshire common. Yes, " there's no 
place like Bradenham " ; it was the Earl of Beacons- 
field's first and last love. He was seventy-six when he 
completed Endymion, and to me one of the most rest- 
ful passages in that dazzling whirl of life and politics 
in high places is his description of the old English hall 
quoted at the beginning of this paper. At Bradenham, 
we are told, a study was always ready for his visits to 
the roof-tree. 

" At Bradenham," writes Mr. Walter Sichel in his 
deeply interesting and able " study " of Disraeli, " his 
constant retreat, the ' Hurstley ' of his last novel, all 
is natural and unconstrained. Here, at least, he is free. 
Here he ' drives the quill ' with his famous father, 
reads and rides, meditates and is mirthful. Here with 
that gifted sister ' Sa ' — ' Sa,' a name soon afterwards 
doubly endeared to him through Lord Lyndhurst's 
daughter ; ' Sa,' who, while others doubt or twit, ever 
believes and heartens him — he dreams, improvises, dis- 



In another passage Mr. Sichel adds : — 

" The Buckinghamshire peasants still cherish his 
memory ; and it may be said with truth that the 
deepest affections of this extraordinary man, whom 
vapid worldlings sneered at as a callous cynic, were 
reserved for his country, his county, his home, and his 
friends, for effort and for distress. Many a young 



THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 81 

aspirant to fame, moreover, in literature or public life 
has owed much to his generous encouragement. He 
loved to dwell on the vicissitudes of things, and his 
motto, * Forti nihil difficile,' represents his conviction. 
In private, when he was not entertaining, his habits 
were of the simplest. In two things only he was pro- 
fuse : books and light. He loved to see every room of 
Hughenden illuminated with candles." 

To return to Disraeli's love of Bradenham, we find 
that love of home running like a golden thread through 
his Home Letters written during that Mediterranean 
tour to which I have already referred, when he would 
write to his sister Sarah from Gibraltar : " Write to 
me about Bradenham, about dogs and horses, orchards, 
gardens, who calls, where you go, who my father sees 
in London, what is said. This is what I want." As 
he drops off to sleep by the wood fire in an Albanian 
castle he thinks " of the blazing blocks in the hall of 
Bradenham." While he feasts royally on the honey of 
Hymettus, and the wild boar of Pentelicus, the latter 
was " not as good as Bradenham pork." As he ran- 
sacks Oriental bazaars, his one thought is the manor 
among the hills. " I never bought anything but with 
a view to its character as furniture. Everything is for 
Bradenham." Even amid the garish splendours of 
Stamboul, when he thinks of home, " a mingled picture 
of domestic enjoyment and fresh butter, from both of 
which I have been so long estranged, daily flits across 
my fancy." All this is very refreshing. We see in the 
Home Letters of this young prince of dandies, a lovable 
personality, an affectionate son and brother, and a 
g 81 



82 THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 

believer in home life, traits of character that afterwards 

endeared him to his Sovereign. 

Yes, " there's no place like Bradenham," and now I 

have reached the top of the hill. Paths crossing each 

other through forest-like glades are perplexingly 

numerous, now flecked with sunshine, now deep in 

shadow according as they wind in and out among the 

brakes, past clumps of beeches or of oaks, clumps of 

junipers, and the ever-present purple heather and 

palm-like bracken. Naphill Common is more like the 

scene of a Midsummer Nighfs Dream, more like the 

home of Oberon and Titania, than any place else that 

I can think of. That gentle philosopher, Jaques de 

Bois, might easily have mistaken this common for a 

bit of the Forest of Arden. It is at least a part of the 

old Chiltern forest, and here, too, the poor sequestered 

stag might have come for shelter, for how goes the old 

song ? You can march along to its joyful measure, 

" sweeping on in the turf-cover'd way," as the song 

says. 

In thornv woods in Buckinghamshire, 

Right fol-lol de-lide O, 
O there's the place to hunt the deer, 

Fol-de-rol lol-de-ri-do. 
Through open path and grassy glade. 
Through sunny ranges and deepening shade, 
The hunters ride, in scarlet arrayed, 

Fol-de-lol, lol-de-lol lido ! 

Leaving the common, and passing Hunt's Hill to 
the right, my route lay through Nap Hill village, 
thence through a tree-fringed lane, past a field of 
purple trifolium and a ploughed field, with white flints 
lying hot in the sun on the top of another breezy table- 



THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 83 

land, where there were pleasing vistas of red-and-white 
cottages, and white chalk-roads winding up into the 
sky. Here the path descends into the woods of Hugh- 
enden. At this point you may walk close up to the 
manor-house, with its great firs, larches, and yews on 
the lawn. The parish church of Hughenden is situated 
in the park lower down the slope. After visiting so 
many picturesque Buckinghamshire churches, one has 
to confess a slight feeling of disappointment on seeing 
it for the first time. Surely the hand of the restorer 
has been laid heavily upon it. Externally it is to all 
intent a modern Gothic structure, relieved only by a 
blaze of crimson ampelopsis. The beautiful interior, 
however, forms a fitting shrine for the great statesman. 
Its Beaconsfield memorial windows, especially the 
great chancel and west windows, make the whole 
building glow like the casement window in The Eve 
of St. Agnes ^ where — 

'Mong thousand heraldries, 
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, 
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings. 

On the north wall of the chancel, just above the 
Earl's stall, is Queen Victoria's memorial. " To the 
dear and honoured memory of Benjamin, Earl of 
Beaconsfield, this memorial is placed by his grateful 
Sovereign and friend, Victoria R.I. Kings love him 
that s-peaketh right" By command of the Queen, his 
banner, helmet, and sword, as Knight of the Garter, 
are also preserved in the chancel. 

Outside the church, and beneath the east window of 
the Montfort Chapel, is the family burying-ground. 



84 THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 

Here lie James and Ralph Disraeli and Mary Anne, 
Countess of Beaconsfield, who died in 1872, followed 
nine years later by the Earl himself, on the 19th of 
April, 1 88 1. A Primrose Dame of Buckinghamshire, 
knowing the object of my pilgrimage, had given me 
that morning a small chaplet to lay on his grave, com- 
posed simply of primrose leaves, wood violets, and 
bays, yet eloquent in its very simplicity. I laid it 
reverently on the grass beside the cross of scarlet 
geraniums and blue lobelia. Resting here awhile, one 
could not but think of the long years of Parliamentary 
strife before Lord Beaconsfield came to his own. The 
greater part of the nineteenth century was to pass over 
his head before his great ideals were to take form. 
Seldom it is that epoch-making men live to see the 
fruits of their labours, but their works do follow them, 
and Great Britain owes her position to-day in the 
councils of Europe to the founder of our modern 
foreign policy. Lord Salisbury truly said of him that 
" zeal for the greatness of England was the passion of 
his life." In turning over the pages of those early 
Home Letters from which I have already quoted in 
connection with Bradenham, I was struck with some 
of his references to the East in the light of late events. 
Young Disraeli had seen Gibraltar, Malta, and Corfu ; 
he had roved in Grecian seas when " the dying glory 
of a Grecian eve bathes with warm light a thousand 
promontories and gentle bays." He passed through 
the Dardanelles. " What a road to a great city ! — 
narrower and much longer than the Straits of Gib- 
raltar, but not with such sublime shores." He landed 
at Cyprus, where he " passed a day on land famous in 



THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 85 

all ages, but more delightful to me as the residence of 
Fortunatus than as the rosy realm of Venus or the 
romantic kingdom of the Crusaders " ; and for a time 
Disraeli drank deep of the glamourie of Egypt and the 
Nile, till " my eyes and mind yet ache with a grandeur 
so little in unison with our own littleness." Lord 
Beaconsfield never forgot that tour in the Mediter- 
ranean, and in after years Britain was the richer for 
that memory. The anxious years from 1875 to 1878, 
leading up to the Berlin Congress, have long since 
taken their place in history. It was then that he 
bought the Suez Canal shares, followed by the pro- 
clamation of the Queen as Empress of India. A year 
later saw the British Fleet in the Dardanelles and the 
Indian troops at Malta, and when, in 1878, he re- 
turned from Berlin, bringing " Peace with Honour," 
the nation learned that he had added Cyprus to the 
great chain of fortresses on the waterway to India, 
that he had, in short, stereotyped one of his ideals, 
" England a great Mediterranean Power." The wis- 
dom of his policy was never more apparent than it is 
to-day. Now we know what it is to be a great Mediter- 
ranean Power, and what other Powers scrambling for 
the crumbs think of that coveted position. Benjamin 
Disraeli was the poet transformed into the man of 
action, and what to others could only be " the conse- 
cration and the poet's dream " became through him 
an accomplished fact. 

Returning from Hughenden in the afternoon, I 
passed through High Wycombe, the scene of Disraeli's 
early Parliamentary conflicts, and stopped at its stately 
parish church — the cathedral of Buckinghamshire it 



86 THE HOMELAND OF THE DISRAELIS 

has been called. When I reached the old Bucks farm- 
house, my temporary resting-place among the hills, 
the owls were calling to each other, and in the wood 
the cushats were crooning to sleep. Forty miles away 
to the south-east beyond the Chilterns a long, luminous 
cloud, resting, it seemed, on the top of the slumbering 
hills, reflected the lights of London. 



VII 

NOVEMBER DAYS : 
SOME AUTUMN MEMORIES 



November days are drear and cold, 
All Nature seeks its winter fold. 

Ah, where are now the hopes of May ? 

Where the bright suns of yesterday ? 
Gone where a thousand suns have roll'd, 
Gone to some dim mysterious wold : 
While Clytie mourns with grief untold, 

And golden Autumn turns to grey 
November days. 
But let not these sad musings mould 
Our thoughts, as if a death-bell knoll'd ; 

By Winter fires sweet visions stray, 

We dream again of Arcady, 
And old romances bathe in gold 

November days. A. G. 



NOVEMBER DAYS: 

SOME AUTUMN MEMORIES 

And autumn laying here and there 
A fiery finger on the leaves. 

Tennyson. 

ALREADY we are in the grip of winter. Looking 
.x\. northward in mid-October, we could see from 
our hill-side that on Ben Ledi lay patches of snow, 
hardly to be distinguished from the lights and shadows 
of distant cloudland. Yet another week, and Allermuir 
looked cold and grey in its dripping garments of sleet. 
The leaves are strewn thick in the garden paths in a 
glorious disorder of russet and gold, and even the 
flowers of autumn are " sicklied over with the pale 
cast of thought," as if they felt that they had outlived 
their time. Only the Michaelmas daisies and the 
chrysanthemums try bravely to hold their own. Here 
and there across the garden the latter wave their 
feathery blooms, varying from white to yellow, from 
pink to deepest damask, from golden brown to bronze, 
their mellow tones harmonise with the sober hues, the 
quiet pleasures of dim November. Save for them, 

Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose. 

Yet winter has her compensations even in a garden. 
It is then that we appreciate the glories of moonlight. 
Not till the end of August do we begin to remember 

«9 



90 NOVEMBER DAYS 

what we owe to the orb of night, and, wayward as is 
our Scottish weather, there are times when the moon 
shines forth in all her splendour, glistening frost-like 
on the sleety hill-side and on the leaves of the ever- 
greens. The garden paths are steeped in a mysterious 
radiance of moonlight and atmosphere, and here a 
week or two ago in this sheltered nook, nestling beside 
some bramble leaves, were four ox-eye daisies, wistfully 
gazing with their great snow-white petals at the silver 
moon — the last of all their company. They still linger 
waiting for their sisters of the garden, the chrysanthe- 
mums — waiting for the inevitable, 

For the drop of the woodland fruit's begun, 
These early November hours. 

These two lines are quoted from Robert Browning's 
poem By the Fireside, beginning : — 

How well I know what I mean to do 
When the long dark autumn evenings come. 

If only we could do it, and not merely dream of doing 
it — but there's the rub ! And so, after studying Corot- 
like effects in a moonlit garden, we are forced to admit 
that old Sarah Battle was right when she believed in a 
clear fire and a clean hearth. If such worldly comforts 
are good as accessories to whist, they are not to be 
despised in a November evening, when, dozing lazily 
over a book, we think of other days in the autumns of 
the past. 

It has been my experience that the most memorable 
days of a holiday have often been those that imme- 
diately preceded the homeward journey. I always re- 
member a visit to Galloway and the long walk by Loch 



NOVEMBER DAYS 91 

Ken to Dairy on one of the last days of September, 
when the sun shone down on the placid lake and on 
the old Castle of Kenmure with all the glory of mid- 
summer. On another occasion, after a rainy holiday 
in the Western Isles, the steamer rounded the Mull of 
Kintyre and passed up the Clyde amid a blaze of 
sunset splendour, gilding the Ayrshire coast-towns 
with the light that one thought " never was on sea or 
land." I still remember, too, the penultimate morn- 
ing of a sojourn in the Highlands of Perthshire. The 
trailing clouds of mist are rising ever so slowly from 
the dense woods on the northern side of the glen, 
beyond which the distant peaks are imperceptibly steal- 
ing into our ken. To the south-east the sun is steeped 
in a luminous mist, like a glory shadowing the unseen ; 
and, amid this changing panorama (to quote from an 
old sixteenth-century poem written by one of the 
Humes of Polwarth) : — 

Sae silent is the cessile air 

That every cry and call, 
The hills and dales and forest fair 

Again repeats them all. 

There is a haunting beauty about that first line. It 
recalls the morning stillness of the Highlands. How 
far the sound travels amid such surroundings ! There 
are voices calling far up the mountain-side. " The 
cock's shrill clarion " and the watch-dog's bark come 
up to us from the little town beneath, and you can 
hear the clock in the church tower striking the hour of 
nine. 

Perfect September mornings ! How they stand out 



92 NOVEMBER DAYS 

from other days. In the pressure of business you may 
pass them by unheeded, or if you momentarily note 
their beauty as you turn to your daily task you think 
of them somewhat in the mood of George Wither 
when he wrote : — 

Shall I, wasting in despair, 
Die, because a woman's fair ? 

If she be not so to me, 
What care I how fair she be ? 

a sound maxim truly when duty calls, but when you 
are off the fang let that morning beauty sink into your 
soul. We may leave the analysis of beauty to meta- 
physicians ; sufficient for us if we can enjoy it, and 
happy are they who in the enjoyment of natural 
scenery have the same catholic taste as Charles Lamb 
had for books. For as there is one glory of the sun 
and another glory of the moon, so one may cherish 
never-to-be-forgotten memories of storm-vexed isles 
and snow-clad peaks as strangely fascinating in their 
loneliness as that mysterious " peak in Darien " ; and 
yet at other times dream of quiet English lanes, old- 
world English villages, and ancient shrines built by the 
Normans. Such a mental picture is before me as I 
write. It is once more a morning in September when 
the white haze rises from the spectral trees, when the 
distant Chilterns to the south are still bathed in atmo- 
sphere. The warm September sun is beating down 
from a cloudless sky, and the pollarded willows in the 
meadow beneath have circular shadows where the 
cattle rest. The depth of the shadows indicates 
the strength of the sunshine ; the deeper the shadow, 



NOVEMBER DAYS 93 

the more restful the shades. Even in the more distant 
meadows the trees are reflected on the green grass as 
in a lake. The finest views in Buckinghamshire are to 
be seen from this ridgeway. Between us and the 
Chiltern Hills is undulating country, and along the 
lesser eminences the trees stand out in relief — here a 
group of poplars, there the square white tower of a 
parish church against a background of elms, and often 
a disused windmill. When the old windmills are in 
use they turn so lazily " in the cessile air " that their 
very motion is restful — it is the movement of a lullaby. 
Thus there are pictures at every turn. An old shep- 
herd comes along the ridgeway leading his flock. 
Leisurely they follow him nibbling at the ample grassy 
margins by the way or at the hedges. One picturesque 
" Oxford Down " is garlanded with trailing brambles 
that stick to his woolly coat. Over the hedge the 
harvest is garnered and the farmer drives his team 
afield, sometimes four horses in tandem yoked to the 
plough and three to the harrow. 

The meditative mood is all very well, but I must 
be up and doing. It was not long, therefore, before I 
had overtaken my patriarchal friend leading his flock. 
My path led me through Waddesdon Manor park, 
dominated by the great French chateau of one of the 
many Rothschilds. Joining the Aylesbury road at 
Waddesdon village, I turned westwards, for I had 
learned that some miles off there stands an ancient 
farmhouse called " Shakespeare House," which in olden 
times was known as The Olde Shipe Inne. Why an 
inn in Buckinghamshire should be called " The Olde 
Shipe " is a Shakespearian problem to be classed with 



94 



NOVEMBER DAYS 



the exploits of the mariner in The Winter's Tale, whose 
ship had touched upon the deserts of Bohemia. The 
house is situated in the village of Grendon Under- 
wood, just off the great highway leading from London 
through Aylesbury, Bicester, and Banbury to Strat- 
ford-on-Avon, and the local tradition is that at this 
hostelry Shakespeare, like old FalstafT, used to take his 
ease at his inn. 

Fully a mile beyond Waddesdon I observed a sign- 
board on my left bearing the interesting inscription, 
" The Hay Binder's Arms." I stopped involuntarily, 




THE HAY BINDER'S ARMS/ 



for there was no house to be seen, but leaning over 
the gateway that breaks the hedge I discovered at some 
distance an old farmhouse surrounded by pollarded 
willows and backed by tall elms. It formed an ideal 



NOVEMBER DAYS 95 

picture for an artist. Blue smoke was curling lazily 
upwards behind the willows, a horse was nibbling at 
a thorn hedge, and the path through the gateway was 
lost in the grass of the meadow. It seemed doubtful 
whether any thirsty wayfarer ever passed through that 
gateway. " Rum place for a ' public,' ain't it, sir ? " 
said a cheery voice behind me. Some descendant of 
Christopher Sly on the tramp seemed to think that 
he had divined my thoughts. Walking silently along 
the grassy margin of the highway, he had come upon 
me unawares. We chatted pleasantly, with that fellow- 
ship which is part of the charm of the road ; and, as 
we were going different ways, I gathered that Christo- 
pher intended to drink my health in a tankard of 
English ale at the next village. Neither of us, at all 
events, cleared up the mystery of the Hay Binder's 
Arms ; it seemed rather a question for the College 
of Heralds. There was more substantiality about the 
next hostelry. It was the typical roadside inn, full of 
colour and not without some life. With its red-tiled 
roof, with its mellow walls of faded red and yellow, its 
blue signboard, and the great oak tree in front of the 
door, it composed beautifully, just, indeed, as if it had 
stepped out of an old coaching print. The signboard 
itself was a masterpiece in its way. It bore the follow- 
ing legend : — 

Mary Uff 

Sells good ale 
And that's enough. 

A mistake here 
Sells foreign spirits 

As well as bere. 



96 NOVEMBER DAYS 

" The Crooked Billet " is a well-known hunting ren- 
dezvous, once patronised by Royalty, so 'tis said, but 
I resisted Mary's enticing invitation — I was full of 
visions of some possible successor to Shakespeare's 
" Olde Shipe " at Grendon Underwood. " A mis- 
take here," as Mary says ; it has just occurred, to me 
that Christopher must needs have passed Mary UfT's 
before he accosted me. Ah, well ! there are tramps 
and tramps, some with the Lavengro spirit in them. 
Your merry tramp goes all the day, while one is 
tempted to refer your whining mendicant to the 
nearest poor-law official. I have hopes of meeting 
Autolycus next. But to return. 

Grendon Underwood is a long straggling village, 
embosomed in trees, and situated in what was once 
the old forest of Bernwode. Most of its cottages are 
thatched, and, indeed, Shakespeare might have lived 
in any one of them, judging from their antiquity. A 
well-filled stackyard near the church at the north end 
of the village indicated the quondam Olde Shipe 
Inne. The central part is still used as a farmhouse, 
but the wing to the left, a three-storied gabled house, 
is fast becoming a ruin, picturesque in its decay with 
its high-pitched roof, tall Elizabethan chimneys, and 
brick-and-timber walls intersected by great black 
beams. In the ground floor there is a large room in 
which many a merry company must have met in the 
olden times. Its features are a Tudor doorway and 
ingle-neuk, and a window filled in with lozenge-shaped 
lattice-work, containing a shield in the centre. Mount- 
ing an old oak balustraded staircase, the steps of which 
have fallen away so that you ascend at your peril, the 




"THE OLDE SHIPE": 

A traditional haunt of Shakespeare. 



98 NOVEMBER DAYS 

farmer will show you the room, lit by a small oval 
window in the gable, where, tradition says, Shake- 
speare slept. Across the road from " Shakespeare 
House " is the parish church, of the usual Bucking- 
hamshire type, a simple nave and chancel, and battle- 
mented square tower, with corner turret. Its porch 
was taken down in 1833, anc ^ w ^ tn lX - disappeared 
another link with Shakespeare, for the local story has 
it that on one occasion Shakespeare himself fell asleep 
in the porch, and was rudely awakened by the village 
constables — the village Dogberry and Verges. It was 
doubtless in these early strolling days that Shakespeare 
met the rustic types that he afterwards immortalised, 
the laughing rogues that enrich his pages with their 
irresistible humour, and serve as a foil to his splendid 
historical pageantries. 

Thus even in the dim November days I am dream- 
ing of the old paths. It is good that it should be so ; 
good for us that such visions sometimes flicker in the 
winter firelight in dull November days, if only you 
have in your heart, as Henley puts it, " some late lark 
singing," if only you have imprisoned there some of 
the summer sunshine, " the joyous blessed sunshine 
of the past." 



VIII 

EVENINGS IN ARDEN : 
A SHAKESPEARIAN REVERIE 



Now am I in Arden. 

"As Ton Like It." 



EVENINGS IN ARDEN : 

A SHAKESPEARIAN REVERIE 

MY latticed window looked out on a small 
orchard, beyond which, under a long, low 
bridge, crept an osier-bordered stream that in a 
few miles would mingle its waters with Shakespeare's 
Avon. The bridge itself was dated 1600, the very 
year in which As You Like It was entered in the 
Stationers' Registers. Across the bridge lies one 
of those ancient, red-bricked, red-tiled, sleepy little 
towns situated in what might be called the purlieus 
of the Forest of Arden ; and on this side, the King's 
highway winds o'er hill and dale to Stratford-on-Avon 
itself, some seven miles distant. 

Here in the very heart of Shakespeare's home 
country one cannot help seeking to view the land- 
scape through Shakespeare's eyes. The surrounding 
orchards, for example, remind one of Justice Shallow's 
garden. " Nay, you shall see mine orchard, where 
in an arbour we will eat a last year's pippin of my 
own graffing, with a dish of caraways, and so forth. 
Come, cousin Silence ! and then to bed." Nay, 
not to bed, your worship, just yet. In this restful 
old cottage, amid the " sweet influence " of a Shake- 
speare-haunted land, what more natural than that 
one should linger for a while over the sayings and 

101 



102 EVENINGS IN ARDEN 

doings of Rosalind, the peerless Rosalind ? The 
Forest of Arden may have become only a memory, 
but still to us, after a summer day's ramble in leafy 
Warwickshire, it is not so difficult amid the quiet of 
evening to repeople its glades with all the goodly 
company that circled round the banished duke, 
when they did " fleet the time carelessly, as they 
did in the golden world." " There is a man haunts 
the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving 
Rosalind on their barks ; hangs odes upon hawthorns, 
and elegies on brambles ; all, forsooth, deifying the 
name of Rosalind." And no wonder, my saucy 
Rosalind ! Did not one Thomas Lodge so describe 
your excellences that Will Shakespeare was tempted 
to weave around you his immortal pastoral ? 

" The blush that gloried Luna, when she kissed 
the shepherd on the hills of Latmos, was not tainted 
with such a pleasant dye as the vermilion flourished 
on the silver hue of Rosalind's countenance ; her 
eyes were like those lamps that made the wealthy 
covert of the heavens more gorgeous, sparkling 
favour and disdain ; courteous and yet coy, as if 
in them Venus had placed all her amorets, and Diana 
all her chastity. The trammels of her hair, folded 
in a caul of gold, so far surpassed the burnished 
glister of the metal as sun doth the meanest star 
in brightness ; the tresses that fold in the brows of 
Apollo were not half so rich to the sight, for in her 
hair it seemed love had laid herself in ambush, to 
entrap the proudest eye that durst gaze upon their 
excellence." 
This is Lodge's vision of Rosalind, printed in 1590. 



EVENINGS IN ARDEN 103 

What Shakespeare afterwards did was to breathe 
the spirit of life into that beautiful picture, so that 
every word Rosalind utters pulsates with all that 
is noblest and tenderest in woman. At no time 
is this more apparent than when in the guise of a 
youth and as Celia's guardian, the distressful Rosa- 
lind bravely seeks to play the man. And yet these 
were merry days withal under the greenwood tree. 
" Sing, heigh ho ! unto the green holly ! " 

Good morrow, fair ones. Pray you if you know 
Where in the purlieus of this forest stands 
A sheepcote, fenc'd about with olive-trees ? 

Celia. West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom : 
The rank of osiers, by the murmuring stream, 
Left on your right hand, brings you to the place. 

In such fashion did these Elizabethan Arcadians 
inquire their way in the Forest of Arden. The philo- 
sophical Jaques may remark that " the way is as plain 
as way to parish church," but in the dim forest soli- 
tudes the way was not always so plain, and considering 
the pranks of some " night tripping fairy " or the more 
serious depredations in such places of Falstafl's com- 
panions, " Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, 
minions of the moon," as he euphemistically calls them, 
it were well to know how to address a stranger in these 
parts. So, at least, thought Shenstone during his fre- 
quent journeyings through Arden, and he, too, being 
a bit of a philosopher, once made some experiments so 
as to ascertain, as he puts it, " the compellations with 
which it is proper to address those he happens to meet 
by his way." He tried such expressions as " honest 



io4 EVENINGS IN ARDEN 

man," " honest friend," and " friend," with varying 
degrees of ill-success. One wayfarer suffered him to 
plunge headlong into a brook amid peals of laughter ; 
another rustic Arcadian " directed me to follow a part 
of my face, which I was well assured could be no guide 
to me." With the caution of a confirmed bachelor, 
Shenstone dreaded the consequences of calling a girl 
" sweetheart " instead of " madam." (Picture the 
very precise Mr. Shenstone meeting Rosalind in 
doublet and hose. What a delightful cross-examina- 
tion she would have given him !) At last he hit cm the 
expedient of saluting the next man he met as " sir," 
and obtained all the information he desired. Poor 
Shenstone ! Student of Shakespeare as he was, he 
must have felt deeply pained to find that the Arden 
of the eighteenth century differed so much from that 
of the sixteenth, as much, indeed, as his time differs 
from ours. Alas ! The philosophies of Jaques and 
Touchstone are now out of date, the spirit of modern- 
ity has long since breathed through the shrunken wood- 
lands. 

Amid these pleasant musings I had forgotten about 
the open casement. The night was dull, but a waning 
moon behind the clouds dimly lit the Stratford road. 
In relief against the shadowy distance a few yards 
from the window rises a Lombardy poplar. ('Tis 
ninety-three feet high, mine host tells me. I could 
discern it three miles distant, towering above the 
surrounding orchards.) In the evening air its graceful 
top seemed to touch the heavens ; but even as I look 
out, a strange unrest begins to take possession of the 
noble tree. The slumbrous whisperings of its shining 



EVENINGS IN ARDEN 105 

aspen-like leaves gradually give place to a sound like 
that of the Atlantic on the surf-beaten shores of " my 
ain countree." The Stratford road is now blotted out. 
The darkness deepens ; louder and louder roars the 
blast as it rushes past that old poplar. There is some- 
thing uncanny about its height as one listens to the 
great wave-like surging sound, now rising, now falling. 
" And this is in the night, most glorious night " in 
Arden ! Oh, Rosalind ! Oh, Celia ! Surely it did not 
often blow like this in the autumnal woods of your 
time. Now the lift is rising again, for I can once more 
see the way to Stratford. The wet road reflects the 
stormy sky, and had a forlorn traveller passed along in 
these eerie midnight hours he might have been mis- 
taken for King Lear on the heath, as the old man 
eloquent addressed the elements : — 

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks ! rage ! blow ! 

For two days the local Press was full of the storm, 
and there were leading articles on the vagaries of the 
British weather. It has come to this, that those quon- 
dam pastoral swains of Arden, Corin and Silvius, 
William and even Audrey, poor Dorothy-draggled- 
tailed Audrey, may now read in their morning papers 
an account of the storm that devastated their wood- 
lands. Again the note of modernity ! But, notwith- 
standing, England is still Shakespeare's England, still 
" our sea-walPd garden " of which he was so proud. 

Since I wrote the above I have seen Stratford-on- 
Avon. For a time I loved to dally with the pleasures 
of anticipation, to think of the great shrine as Words- 



106 EVENINGS IN ARDEN 

worth thought of Yarrow unvisited ; but the Stratford 
road is mysterious no longer, save at the midnight hour. 
One Sunday morning I rambled through an undulating 
land of green pastures, bordered with oaks and dotted 
with Elizabethan cottages, a land of hanging woods in 
which the cushats were crooning. Here at last is 
Stratford-on-Avon ! As I stand on the sixteenth- 
century Clopton Bridge for the first time on a perfect 
summer's day, the Shakespeare Memorial and the 
Church of the Holy Trinity are silhouetted against a 
cloudless sky. The sun is almost overhead, and re- 
flected as a glistening ball on the placid waters of the 
Avon beneath. The green meadows and the grand 
elms surrounding the Holy Trinity are soothing to the 
eye. Never shall I forget my first morning service in 
the parish church of Stratford. The cathedral-like 
church is crowded, but yonder, separated by the 
sanctuary rails, yonder in the noble chancel with its 
great emblazoned perpendicular windows, rest the 
remains of all that was mortal of William Shakespeare 
waiting for the fullness of the time. 

So sepulchured in such pomp dost lie 

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. 

Presently, with one great jubilant note, the whole 
congregation, led by the surpliced choir and great 
organ, burst into the Te Deum Laudamus, sung to 
Woodward's music. Now joyfully triumphant, now 
tender as the Song of Simeon, that grand old hymn 
sounded the heights and depths of devotional worship. 
To quote the words of our late Laureate Alfred 
Austin : 




THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, STRATFORD-ON-AVON : 

Shakespeare's shrine. 



108 EVENINGS IN ARDEN 

Nor need you then seek, far and near, 
More sumptuous shrines on alien strand, 

But with domestic mind revere 
The Ritual of your native Land. 

The object of this paper, however, was to record 
only the evenings spent in Arden, not the days. 
" Many can brook the weather, that love not the 
wind," says the curate in Love's Labour's Lost, and so 
we were not sorry when Nature returned to her more 
tranquil moods. In those peaceful evening hours the 
Stratford road shone once more with a dim luminosity, 
" the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow," and the floor of 
heaven was again " thick inlaid with patines of bright 
gold." Looking out from the lattice, the poplar still 
commands the prospect, and one can just make out 
Charles's Wain to the left, and to the right the con- 
stellations of Cassiopeia and Perseus. Low down on 
the horizon the Pleiades faintly twinkle, faintly because 
in a few minutes more an orange-coloured half-moon, 
the waning moon, steals up the eastern sky, becoming 
more and more silver-like as it slowly rises to the zenith. 
My dreamy casement window was dreamy once more, 
and no longer, as in the height of the storm, did it 
suggest Keats's 

Magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 

Rather did it resemble the balcony of Juliet. In such 
a night did Jessica trip to meet her lover Lorenzo. 
'Twas such a night as this on which Orlando, for we 
must not forget we are in Arden, would call the 
" thrice-crowned queen of night " to be a witness of 
his love. Shakespeare's night ! It was because he had 



EVENINGS IN ARDEN 109 

seen the beauties of sunrise and sunset, the waxing and 
waning of the moon in beautiful Warwickshire, that 
he was able to write not only as the poet of court, 
camp, and grove, but also as the poet of Nature. 
Here, in Warwickshire, Nature is never far distant. She 
lifts her veil shyly and blushingly to those who would 
look upon her chaste face. (Surely there was a slight 
splash in that deep, silent river, a few yards from the 
window, close to that " rank of osiers." Was it a trout, 
or but the blob of a water-vole ?) And now the clocks 
in the neighbouring town are striking the hour of mid- 
night. What a delightful sensation it is to listen to 
them one by one ! I believe the old grandfather's clock 
downstairs led the ball. The dear old fellow must have 
been a trifle fast, notwithstanding his years, a quarter 
of a minute perhaps. Then came the unmistakable 
chimes from the old parish church tower across the 
river, followed by more distant chimes coming from 
whence I cannot tell. The same thing is happening 
at the present moment in other country towns and 
villages ; but, ah ! the difference. Is not this Arden ? 
Is not that the road to Stratf ord-on-Avon ? So would 
we dream and dream until 

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. 



IX 

WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN : 

AN IDYL OF THE HUNTING-FIELD 



With hound and horn, o'er moor, and hill, and dale, 
The chase sweeps on ; no obstacle they heed, 
Nor hedge, nor ditch, nor wood, nor river wide. 
The clamorous pack rush rapid down the vale. 

Grabame's " Rural Calendar," October. 



WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN : 

AN IDYL OF THE HUNTING-FIELD 

THERE was hunting in Arden when Rosalind wan- 
dered through its forest glades in doublet and 
hose, and when lords in exile discussed the chase from 
the point of view of the " poor sequestered stag." 
There was hunting, too, in Arden when one Christo- 
pher Sly, a tinker with aristocratic pretensions, used to 
call at the hostelry of Mistress Marian Hacket, " the 
fat alewife of Wincot," or Wilmcote. Even after 
Shakespeare's time this particular corner of Warwick- 
shire continued to be identified with sport, for here 
lived and died William Somervile, the sportsman-poet 
of England. The coach road from London to Bir- 
mingham passes close to the parish church of Wootton 
Wawen, where he rests, and the milestone at the bridge 
of Wootton informs us that we are exactly one hundred 
miles from London, two miles from Henley-in-Arden, 
and six miles from Stratford-on-Avon. Thus the very 
milestones are reminiscent of Shakespeare, and we pass 
English lanes with finger-posts inviting us to Warwick, 
Hampton Lucy, and Wilmcote, the early home of 
Mary Arden, Shakespeare's mother. But though we 
are in the heart of Arden, our present pilgrimage is 
not to the great shrine at Stratford-on-Avon. An 
i 113 



n 4 WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 

interesting minor poet of Arden claims the tribute of 
a more than passing reference. 

William Somervile of Edstone was a fine old country 
gentleman all of the olden time — something of the 




3C£S 









'<rr ' 



'sst/fffyi^ 






MARY ARDEN'S COTTAGE, WILMCOTE. 



school of Sir Roger de Coverley, with a strong dash of 
Squire Western. But whereas Addison and Fielding 
gave us types, Somervile gave us himself. Born at 
Edstone Grange, near Wootton, in 1677, and educated 
at Winchester, and New College, Oxford, Somervile 
combined with his fox-hunting instincts the literary 
culture of the reign of Queen Anne. Dr. Johnson 
wrote of him that " he was distinguished as a poet, a 
gentleman, and a skilful and useful justice of the 



WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 115 

peace." This country squire gathered about him a 
small coterie of local literary friends — Shenstone, and 
Lord Bolingbroke's sister, Lady Luxborough, among 
the number. When Joseph Addison purchased an 
estate in Warwickshire, Somervile wrote a poem con- 
gratulating him on his choice of a district 

Distinguish'd by th' immortal Shakespeare's birth ; 

and now 

Ardenna's groves shall boast an Addison. 

He also wrote eulogies on Pope and Thomson. As the 
representative of one of the oldest families in England, 
he dispensed hospitality on a lordly scale, and in the 
end, in return for timely pecuniary help, he left the 
reversion of his estates of Edstone and Somervile- Aston 
in Gloucestershire to Lord Somervile, the Scottish 
representative of the same old Norman family. Mean- 
time this Warwickshire squire's poems percolated to 
Scotland, and Allan Ramsay, recognising in the poet 
a kinsman of his patron, sent him a laudatory epistle. 
Somervile returns the compliment, telling him how, 
" near fair Avona's silver tide," he reads to delighted 
swains Ramsay's jocund songs and rural strains. He 
then goes on to say what longings he has felt 

to view those lofty spires, 
Those domes, where fair Edina shrouds 
Her towering head amid the clouds ; 

but that the journey was too serious an undertaking 
in those early eighteenth-century days. Ramsay re- 
plies by inviting him north in summer-time, while 
" Caledonia's hills are green," and assures him of 



n6 WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 

a welcome " To Ed'nburgh and the Land of 
Cakes." 

I doubt, however, whether he would have exchanged 
his life in Warwickshire for the northern capital, and 
it is a curious coincidence that among his poems there 
is one addressed to a Dr. Mackenzie, who had evidently 
worked his way into the affections of his Warwickshire 
patients. (His name, by the way, occurs also in Shen- 
stone's Letters.) 

But still the heart is true, the heart is Highland, 

and doubtless the Scottish doctor had some thought 
of returning to his native land, and thus gave Somervile 
occasion to write a poem that was at once a graceful 
tribute to a beloved physician and a reflex of the poet's 
own kindly soul : — 

O thou, whose penetrating mind, 
Whose heart benevolent and kind 
Is ever present in distress, 
Glad to preserve and proud to bless : 
Oh ! leave not Arden's faithful grove, 
On Caledonian hills to rove ; 
But hear our fond united prayer 
Nor force a county to despair. 

With these impressions of the man, I turn to Edstone 
Grange and to the poem by which he is remembered, 
The Chace. 'Tis a pleasant country round about 
Edstone, and it retains many features that would be 
familiar to Somervile two hundred years ago. The old 
parish churches of the district would differ little. 
This, too, is a land of timbered cottages of the Eliza- 
bethan age, the spaces between the oaken beams some- 



WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 117 

times filled in with brick and sometimes with wattles 
and clay like basket-work, and yet there they stand, 
their general effect softened by time until every grada- 
tion of colour is represented on their venerable walls. 
Under certain atmospheric conditions they burn and 
glow like leaves in autumn. Where so little has changed 
it is unfortunate that the Edstone Grange of Somer- 
vile's time has given place to a modern mansion with 
classic porticoes. But the old elms that surround the 
house look as if they belonged to the earlier period. 
There, too, close by the house, is Somervile's brook. 
It still flows on as of yore, chattering merrily over its 
pebbly bed, with eddies here and there where one 
would fain cast a fly in the hope of catching a trout. 
The trees by the brook are all old and weather-beaten 
— oaks, thorns, and elms. Yonder a heron rises above 
the trees in Somervile's own demesne — descendant — 
who knows ? — of the noble bird that he apostrophises 
so beautifully in his Field Sports, when mighty princes 
did not disdain to wear 

Thy waving crest, the mark of high command. 

On this September day there is the soughing of the 
east wind, a kindly, cooling east wind that is welcome. 
Here in this great silent park, overlooking the spot 
where the cattle come to the brook to drink, here is 
the place to turn over the pages of Somervile's Chace. 
You note the date of its publication, 1735, and then 
you glance at his old-world preface, in which he cites 
ancient authorities such as Xenophon, Pliny, Oppian, 
Gratius, Galen, Nemesianus ; and when he has thus 
sufficiently convinced his reader of the dignity of his 



n8 WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 

subject, the old Adam bursts forth in his last para- 
graph. 

" But I have done," he says, and jolly glad he was 
to be done, I fancy. " But I have done. I know the 
impatience of my brethren, when a fine day, and the 
concert of the kennel, invite them abroad. I shall 
therefore leave my reader to such diversion as he may 
find in the poem itself." 

And so we come to " the poem itself." To give it 
a more literary flavour Somervile enters into the history 
of hunting and the modes of hunting abroad, for which 
he received the encomiums of Dr. Johnson. To-day, 
however, we are more interested in the poem in so far 
as it illustrates English sport in the eighteenth century. 

First let the kennel be the huntsman's care, 

Upon some little eminence erect, 

And fronting to the ruddy dawn ; its courts 

On either hand wide op'ning to receive 

The sun's all-cheering beams, when mild he shines, 

And gilds the mountain tops. For much the pack 

(Rous'd from their dark alcoves) delight to stretch, 

And bask, in his invigorating ray : 

Warn'd by the streaming light and merry lark, 

Forth rush the jolly clan ; with tuneful throats 

They carol loud, and in grand chorus join'd 

Salute the new-born day. 

Apart from the poetic diction of the period, this is 
a pleasing picture. It is an autumn morning in War- 
wickshire. There has been just a touch of frost during 
the night ; but the warm September sun soon dries up 
the moisture on the grass, and we seem to see the fox- 
hounds coming out into the courts, stretching their 
legs and simultaneously opening wide their jaws in that 



WITH SMOERVILE IN ARDEN 119 

long-drawn yawn that clears away the cobwebs of the 
night. Now we're ready for anything, they. seem to 
say. Breakfast first, and then — " Hark together ! 
hark ! and forrard away ! " 

Somervile was a sanitarian : he believed in cleanli- 
ness, and in practical fashion points out the advantages 
of plenty of water. Again and again he discusses the 
welfare of the pack. Be kind to the dogs, is his motto ; 
when the weather is unsuitable for hunting, he coun- 
sels the enthusiast, " Kindly spare thy sleeping pack in 
their warm beds of straw." On such days he recom- 
mends his " Brethren of the Couples " to spend their 
precious hours in study. Somervile expects the fol- 
lowers of the chase to be gentlemen in every sense of 
the word, and he is particularly hard on the "bounders" 
(to use a modern expression) who sometimes haunt the 
hunting-field. Because a man loved horses and rode to 
hounds, Somervile saw no reason why sport should 
absorb his whole attention, to the exclusion of mental 
accomplishments — culture, in short — and the work 
that lay to his hand. 

Well-bred, polite, 
Credit thy calling. See ! how mean, how low, 
The bookless saunt'ring youth, proud of the skut 
That dignifies his cap, his nourish'd belt, 
And rusty couples jingling by his side. 
Be thou of other mould ; and know that such 
Transporting pleasures were by Heav'n ordain'd 
Wisdom's relief, and Virtue's great reward. 

It was a saying of Somervile's friend Shenstone that 
" the world may be divided into people that read, 
people that write, people that think, and foxhunters." 



120 WITH SOMERV1LE IN ARDEN 

Somervile did his best to modify this humorous esti- 
mate, if possible, by judicious blending. 

But away with such sentiments and aphorisms on 
this fine hunting morning. Now our sportsman-poet 
is in the saddle. Men, horses, and dogs participate in 
the " universal joy." The harvest is gathered in, and 
the contented farmer courteously levels his fences and 
joins in the common cry. The description of the hunt 
is perhaps the finest passage in the whole poem. All 
is life and bustle, till 

The welkin rings, men, dogs, hills, rocks, and woods, 
In the full concert join. 

On, on they go, and well away. The hunters shout, 
and the clanging horns swell their sweet, winding notes. 
On through a village the rattling clamour rings, out 
into the open again, and as the hunt flies past, 

The weary traveller forgets his road, 
And climbs th' adjacent hill ; the ploughman leaves 
Th' unfinish'd furrow ; nor his bleating flocks 
Are now the shepherd's joy ; men, boys, and girls, 
Desert th' unpeopled village. 

I recollect standing on such a hill on the borders of 
Worcestershire. Looking westward there was a great 
expanse of tree-fringed meadows and tree-crowned 
heights, until the horizon was bounded by the dim 
haze of the distant Malverns. As my local gossip 
pointed out with genuine enthusiasm, why, from this 
spot you can see the hunt working for " moiles an' 
moiles." So it was in Somervile's day ; so it is still. 
The whole village seems somehow to be well up with 
the hounds, for in every village there are some old 
peasants, enthusiastic sportsmen, who in their War- 



WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 121 

wickshire dialect will tell you which way the fox is 
sure to go and where he is most likely to be run to 
earth. And then when all is over the farmer calls the 
hunt to a " short repast." He himself passes round in 
ample measure the home-brewed ale, while 

His good old mate 
With choicest viands heaps the liberal board. 

But the hunt is not always o'er hill and dale, or 
skimming with " well-breathed beagles " 1 the distant 
Cotswolds near Somervile's Gloucestershire estate of 
Somervile- Aston. The deep, sluggish streams of Arden 
are still the haunt of the otter, and in Book the Fourth, 
Somervile describes an otter hunt. Just as Reynard is 
the terror of the farmyard, the otter is the midnight 
poacher of the stream. All is fish that comes into his 
net, the ravenous pike, the perch, the yellow carp, the 
" insinuating " eel, and 

The crimson-spotted trout, the river's pride 
And beauty of the stream. 

Once more the air resounds with melody. The har- 
monious notes float with the stream, and the otter 
hounds : — 

Now on firm land they range, then in the flood 
They plunge tumultuous ; or thro' reedy pools 
Rustling they work their way, 

1 The adjective is Somervile's ; and no doubt Young, the Vicar of 
Welwyn, in his satire Love of Fame, refers to Somervile when he writes : — 

The Squire is proud to see his coursers strain 
Or ivell-breath , d beagles sweep along the plain, 

and goes on to satirise the country justice whose country wit " shakes 
the clumsy bench," and whose " erudition is a Christmas-tale " : — 

Warm in pursuit of foxes, and renown, 
Hippolitus demands the "sylvan crown." 



122 WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 

storming the otter's citadel, some hollow trunk or 
spreading roots beneath the surface of the stream. 

Thus passes the glorious September morning. I 
have long since left the brook at Edstone Grange, and 
the pathway now leads through the meadows to the 
sedgy banks of the river Alne, fringed with osiers, as 
Shakespeare takes care to tell us, and dotted here and 
there with pollard willows or giant oaks. In the middle 
distance stands out in relief the beautiful church of 
Aston Cantlow with its square embattled tower, and 
in front the river is glistening in the sunshine. Somer- 
vile's sounding iambics are still ringing in my ears. 
But hark ! surely the sound is more than imaginative. 
Surely that is the distant sound of a horn. A faint 
halloo is borne down the stream, and, yes, is not that 
the music of the pack ? The effect is somewhat stagey, 
I must admit, reading Somervile's Cbace by his own 
meads and streams, to the music, it would seem, of his 
own invisible otter hounds. Who knows who may be 
present amid this ghostly company ? — perhaps Rosa- 
lind ! or at least Cicely ! She would be sure to come 
over from Wilmcote with the village lads. 

But it was neither imagination nor a spectral hunt 
after all, for here they come across the meadows, stal- 
wart huntsmen armed with staves and dressed in the 
blue serge knickerbocker suit and red stockings of the 
otter hunt, with the otter paw or pad as a badge on 
their caps ; and ladies, too, with their smart short 
skirts — happy, healthy English gentlewomen : the 
women you meet on a Highland moor in August 
tramping the heather with their sportsmen friends : 
women who can throw a fly or play a salmon as skil- 



WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 123 

fully as their husbands or brothers. And the dogs ? 
Aye ! here they are, with their long ears and rough 
coats dripping — serious-looking animals who gaze up 
into your face with such solemn, wistful eyes. It was 
all so strange, this sudden bustle at the mill, the alfresco 
luncheon in the meadow by the millstream, and the 
sound of merry voices after the morning's day-dreaming. 

Luncheon over, on went the merry party, working 
the streams lower down the river toward Alcester. 
Into the distance died away the sound of the cheering 
voices, the huntsman's horn, and the concert of the 
kennel, and all was quiet again as I turned to Wootton 
Wawen Church. Shrines of petrified poetry, I have 
elsewhere called these parish churches of England. 
Such is Wootton Wawen. You enter a building that 
has been consecrated to the service of God for well- 
nigh a thousand years. It is true that in the history 
of the universe a thousand years are as one day ; but 
a thousand years to us practically embrace the whole 
history of our native land. Wootton Wawen is thus 
not merely a pre-Reformation church, but it dates 
back beyond the Norman Conquest. Originally a 
Saxon church, with no form nor comeliness save its 
primitive simplicity and massiveness, it extended down 
through the centuries into a nave and south aisle to 
the west, and chancel and chantry chapel to the east. 
Saxon, Norman, Early English, Decorated Gothic, 
Perpendicular, and Flamboyant are all represented 
in Wootton Wawen Church, until now it stands an 
epitome of the history of English ecclesiastical 
architecture. 

Here is the shrine of Somervile, the poet of The 



124 WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 

Chace. Here he was buried in 1742, at the age of 
sixty-five. Unconsciously treading on the very blue- 
stone slab beneath which he lies, one steps reverently 
backwards to read the epitaph that he himself penned. 
It is written in Latin, but has been Englished thus : 

" If you see anything good in me, imitate it. If 
you discover anything bad, shun it with your very best 
endeavour. Remember that, though young, you may 
be on the verge of death. You must die. Trust in 
Christ." 

As you read these thoughtful lines, his personality 
seems to stand out stronger than ever. Only a minor 
poet whom nobody reads, the last of an ancient race, 
tall and fair, with that kind of aristocratic beauty of 
countenance such as we associate with the features of 
Claverhouse, but without the latter's traditional 
cruelty, for a warmer-hearted man than William 
Somervile never breathed, — we seem to see him in his 
prime, the dashing horseman heading a cry of hounds, 
or with his spaniels starting the whirring pheasant 
during his morning walk. Then in later years, 
shadowed as he was by pecuniary difficulties, we recall 
his own picture of himself retiring to his old elbow 
chair, and in half-humorous, half-serious fashion 
upbraiding it for looking so spruce in its new cover, 
" a very beau," confessing that in his youthful days he 
loved it less, but now ! — 

Here on thy yielding down I sit secure, 

And, patiently, what Heaven has sent, endure ; 

From all the futile cares of business free ; 

Not fond of life, but yet content to be ; 

Here mark the fleeting hours ; regret the past ; 

And seriously prepare to meet the last. 



WITH SOMERVILE IN ARDEN 125 

Somervile compares himself to an old pensioned sailor, 

secure from the buffetings of the storm, meditating 

alone 

On his great voyage to the world unknown. 

His wife had predeceased him, leaving no issue. His 
favourite huntsman and butler, James Boeter, died as 
the result of an accident in the hunting-field (and 
Somervile had written his epitaph), to be followed to 
" the world unknown " by another old huntsman and 
servant, Hoitt by name. 

Here Hoitt, all his sports and labours past, 
Joins his loved master, Somervile, at last ; 
Together went they echoing fields to try, 
Together now in silent dust they lie. 

With such chastening thoughts and impressions the 
pilgrim leaves this old Saxon shrine, silently eloquent 
with the memories of a thousand years. After all, 
what was the life of the poet to this venerable build- 
ing, this mother church which had nourished, it may 
be, generations of Somerviles for centuries before he 
was born ? Stately mural monuments, recumbent 
effigies, even the modest slabs that pave her floors, tell 
us that he was only one of her children. But to us so 
many are but names — albeit some are honoured names 
in England's history — that we give them little more 
than a passing glance. To us this is the shrine of 
Somervile, and the human interest attaching to the 
sportsman-poet reigns supreme. 



X 

FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY: 
A RAID INTO SHENSTONE'S COUNTRY 



The pilgrim that journeys all day 

To visit some far-distant shrine 
If he bear but a relic away 

Is happy, nor heard to repine. 

Shenstone's " Pastoral Ballad." 



FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 



A RAID INTO SHENSTONE'S COUNTRY 



To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue, 
And bid Arcadia bloom around. 

Shenstone's " Pastoral Ballad." 

THIS was William Shenstone's mission. For this 
he spent his life and fortune. He was among the 
last of the .Arcadians of the classical school, for the 
advent of Gray, Cowper, and Burns proclaimed the 
dawn of a new era in poetry, when the shadowy groves 
were no longer to be peopled by the pagan followers 
of Pan. Born in 17 14, when the conventional pastoral- 
ism of the seventeenth century still lingered, Shen- 
stone himself had a genuine appreciation of Nature, 
and although he adorned his grounds with memorial 
obelisks and urns, grottos and alcoves, he is now re- 
membered as the founder of English landscape garden- 
ing rather than as a poet of Arcady. He died a beggar 
in order to turn his farm, The Leasowes, at Hales Owen, 
near Birmingham, into one of the " show " places of 
England. To quote George Gilfillan, " as Augustus 
boasted that he found Rome brick and left it marble, 
so our poet found his property a mass of commonplace 
confusion, and left it a garden of Alcinous." In this 
respect he recalls Sir Walter and Abbotsford, and, 
k 129 



130 FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 

indeed, in the autobiographical introduction to Rokeby 
we find Scott's own confession : " I can trace even to 
childhood a pleasure derived from Dodsley's account 
of Shenstone's Leasowes, and I envied the poet much 
more for the pleasure of accomplishing the objects de- 
tailed in his friend's sketch of his grounds than for the 
possession of pipe, crook, flock, and Phyllis to boot." 
When Horace Walpole made Strawberry Hill famous 
he experienced Shenstone's joy, but he soon became 
tired of the endless round of sightseers and the conse- 
quent invasion of his privacy. " It is," he writes, " as 
bad as keeping an inn." 

Shenstone was not only a typical Arcadian, he was 
also a minor poet of Arden. Indeed, it was during my 
pilgrimage to the great shrine at Stratford-on-Avon 
that I visited the lesser shrines associated with Shen- 
stone and Somervile, the sportsman-poet of England. 
In the preceding paper 1 described the Warwickshire 
homeland of the author of The Cbace, and in this 
paper I wish to confine myself to a sentimental journey 
from Arden to Shenstone's Arcady. It was at Wootton 
Wawen Church, wherein Somervile lies, that I first 
joined the great coach road from London to Birming- 
ham. On a fine autumnal morning I rested on a low 
parapeted bridge into which was built a milestone, 
dated 1806, bearing the following directions : — 

To London, 100 miles. 
Stratford-on-Avon, 6. 
Henley-in-Arden, 2. 
Birmingham, 16. 

Beneath the bridge flowed that slumbrous English 
stream the Alne. I love that stream ; it has crossed mv 



FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 131 

path in so many places during its course of seventeen 
miles until it joins the Arrow at Alcester, and thence- 
forth flows majestically to lave, with the parent stream, 
the walls of Shakespeare's resting-place. At Wootton 
the river is dammed back to feed a flour-mill, and here 
the purple cranesbill gave colour to its grassy margins. 
The poplars grouped as of yore, and below the bridge 
stood an angler. How often have I seen similar 
pictures in other provinces of Arcady. 

Henley-in-Arden might be considered the frontier 
of Shenstone's country. It consists of a long street 
composed of old-fashioned hostelries left high and dry 
save when visited perhaps by the Birmingham tripper. 
The crack of the whip and the echoing horn of the old 
coaching days are heard no more, but now in a whirl- 
wind of dust the motor " toots " past. Hither, in the 
eighteenth-century days, Shenstone often came to 
visit his patroness, my Lady Luxborough, sister of the 
great Bolingbroke. It was during that ever-delightful 
ramble in a post-chaise to Oxford, Stratford, and 
Lichfield in 1776 that Johnson and Boswell drove 
through Arden, the occasion when the old Doctor ex- 
claimed, " Life has not many things better than 
this ! " At Oxford, you remember, they put up at 
" The Angel," but they were invited to dine with the 
Canon of Christchurch. " Sir," exclaimed the Doctor 
to Boswell, " it is a great thing to dine with the 
Canons of Christchurch." On their way to Stratford 
they dined at a wayside inn, and there Johnson " ex- 
patiated on the felicity of England in its taverns and 
inns. . . . You are sure you are welcome ; and the 
more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the 



132 FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 

more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. 
. . ." He then repeated, with great emotion, says 
Boswell, Shenstone's lines : — 

Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, 
Where'er his stages may have been, 

May sigh to think he still has found 
The warmest welcome at an inn. 

That night, the 21st of March, 1766, they spent at the 
inn at Henley, where Shenstone was understood to 
have written the above lines. 

Amid the multiplicity of old coaching inns in this 
corner of Arden he would be a bold pilgrim who 
attempted to identify at a single visit by a house-to- 
house visitation the particular inn to which Shenstone 
refers. More than one was pointed out to me. Pru- 
dence would certainly suggest that the inquiry, if 
called for, should be spread over a considerable period ; 
and so I gave up this interesting bit of antiquarian 
research, in order to visit the Norman church of Beau- 
desert. The pilgrim might easily miss this church, for 
the feature of the main street of Henley-in-Arden is 
the embattled tower and crocketed pinnacles of the 
church of St. John the Baptist. Close to the latter a 
cross-street, or lane rather, leads eastwards to the Alne, 
now a tiny stream, and across the bridge is this parish 
church of Beaudesert, the stream being the boundary 
between the two parishes. The church at once re- 
called our own grey Dalmeny, both in size and treat- 
ment, save that the former has a western tower, but, 
ah, the difference ! The English church has been 
judiciously restored, where necessary ; the chancel and 




BEAUDESERT CHURCH, WARWICKSHIRE : 

A litany in stone. 



134 FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 

apse are furnished in keeping with its architecture in a 
spirit in which reverence and art combine to make it 
what it is, a litany in stone. You have only to visit 
Dalmeny Church, one of the most interesting speci- 
mens of Norman architecture in Scotland, and grind 
your teeth as you look into the little parlour, cut into 
the north wall, with its commonplace chairs, sofa, and 
looking-glass. When I remember Dalmeny, I can even 
forgive Stoke Pogis for its harmless, if ostentatious, 
display of the Penn chairs. At Dalmeny there are still 
to be seen the two steps leading to the apse, now, alas ! 
furnished with pews, some of them necessarily semi- 
circular in shape to fit in with the apsidal configura- 
tion. The magnificent vaulting, with its zigzag or 
chevron mouldings, remains, but stone shafts have been 
cut away wherever they interfered with the pews, and 
as you look eastwards beyond those mutilated shafts 
your vision is bounded by the occupants of the apse 
facing westwards from their " coigne of 'vantage." 
To be confronted by a row of spring bonnets where 
you expect to contemplate the holy symbols of the 
Most High is, at least, disconcerting. It is only when 
you stumble across an old parish church like Beaudesert 
that you realise what might have been. Here in 
Shakespeare's Arden, as you lift the latch of the wire- 
screen in the north porch, you remember Rossetti's 
lines — 

Having entered in, we shall find there 
Silence and sudden dimness, and deep prayer 
And faces of crowned angels all about. 

The " Rambler in Arcadia " must be pardoned if he 
is discursive, for 'tis his nature to be so. He is a true 



FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 135 

saunterer : he cannot pass a byway, such as that which 
led to Beaudesert, without wishing to explore it. Is 
it not sufficient to know that I am in Shenstone's 
country ? Besides, I am not expected at The Lea- 
sowes among the " genteel company of which this 
season has afforded me at least an equal share with 
any that w T ent before " — to wit, my Lord Duke and 
her Grace of Richmond, the Earl of Bath, the Earl 
and Countess of Northampton, Lord Mansfield, and 
so on until you come to commoners like Mr. Pitt's 
nephew. Poor Shenstone ! As Gray read his Letters 
at the time of their publication, it seemed to him 
that this poet of Arcady only enjoyed his paradise 
when people of note came to see and commend it. 

But Henley, though situated on the great highway 
to the Midland capital, is not in a direct line with 
Hales Owen, and so the pilgrim must either find his 
way north-westwards by cross-country roads, retrace 
his steps, and go by rail, or make Hales Owen a sepa- 
rate pilgrimage. On leaving Henley you leave Arden 
and the charm of picturesque Warwickshire. Further 
north you begin to feel that you are approaching the 
Birmingham zone. At the village of Northfield, some 
six miles from Hales Owen, I was again attracted by 
an old English parish church, partly Norman, partly 
early English. It was surrounded by ancient elms, and 
its yews alone testified to its antiquity. As I entered 
through a porch of oaken beams embowered in roses 
I noticed that the sanctuary lamps in the chancel were 
kept burning even in daytime. 

From Northfield the pilgrim's way led uphill and 
down dale, past tree-fringed cornfields and meadows. 



136 FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 

Now the road narrows into a winding lane, bordered 
by oaks and brackens, where at a sudden turn of the 
road you must stand aside to give way to the lumber- 
ing English wain drawn by horses in tandem, returning 
from the harvest field. Beneath the hedges, the faded 
leaves of violets and foxgloves were reminiscent of 
spring and summer. The great ruins of the old Pre- 
monstratensian Abbey were the first indication that I 
was approaching The Leasowes. Little is left of this 
monastic building. Its ruined walls are now used as 
supports for the great barns of a farm, and one of its 
Gothic arches forms a picturesque entrance from the 
farmyard to the farmer's garden. In England there 
are such things as ruined abbeys, after all, mainly due 
to the policy of our first " Defender of the Faith " — 
the irony of it ! To Shenstone the proximity of the 
ruined abbey was an ever-present factor in his secluded 
environment, and as I wandered through the farm- 
yard, once consecrated ground, I thought of the lines 
with which the poet concludes his poem, The Ruirfd 
Abby :— 

While thro' the land the musing pilgrim sees 
A tract of brighter green, and in the midst 
Appears a mouldering wall, with ivy crown'd 
Or Gothic turret, pride of ancient days. 

Shenstone, from his sunny southern slopes, could 
look down on the fishponds of the monks of Hales 
Abbey, as if they formed part of his property. At 
another bend of the road I caught my first glimpse of 
the white house of The Leasowes, a comparatively 
modern building, not the Tudor farm of Shenstone's 
day. In a few minutes more I was startled by a sign- 



FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 137 

board at the entrance to a bosky lane, indicating that 
The Leasowes was now " a Physical Training College 
for Women Teachers." The literary pilgrim will face 
a great deal to visit the particular shrine to which he 
has turned his footsteps, but he is not always prepared 
to face an array of 

Sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair, 

engrossed in the study of " Ling's Swedish System," 
physiology, pathology, vegetarianism, and the laws of 
health. It was all very well for Tennyson to write : — 

At break of day the College Portress came ; 

She brought us Academic silks, in hue 

The lilac, with a silken hood to each, 

And zoned with gold ; and now when these were on, 

And we as rich as moths from dusk cocoons, 

She, curtseying her obeisance, let us know 

The Princess Ida waited. 

As I clambered up the hill to " The College," I 
looked ruefully at my travel-stained garments. In due 
course I reached the entrance, rang the bell, delivered 
a message to the " College Portress," and was ushered 
into the presence of the " Princess Ida." The scene 
was changed indeed. I had expected to meet a modern 
successor to kind-hearted Mrs. Arnold, Shenstone's 
housekeeper, followed by half a dozen chickens, " poor 
pretty creters" But I had " the Princess " to deal 
with, and I recollect that as I sat in her sanctum my 
first impressions were that I should not mind having 
a course of " Ling's " Swedish drill under such tuition, 
although I might kick at the " nut foods made diges- 
tible by scientific preparation." The inquiring look 



138 FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 

of the Lady Principal, however, dispelled such frivolous 
thoughts, and I proceeded to explain my intrusion. 
My lady seemed surprised to learn that Shenstone's 
name, not to say his fame, had reached Scotland, and 
I ventured to remind her of Burns's admiration for 
the poet of The Leasowes. After conducting me 
round the principal schoolrooms, " the Princess " very 
courteously gave me directions how best to inspect the 
grounds. Notwithstanding the charm of her presence, 
I left her with a feeling almost akin to disappointment 
that one so debonair should have an imperfect sym- 
pathy for the genius loci of her own domain. What 
would my Lady Luxborough have thought of it all ! 
But time was pressing. It would have been inter- 
esting to have followed either Dodsley's route round 
the " ferme ornee," as Shenstone called it, or in the 
footsteps of Hugh Miller in his pilgrimage somewhere 
about 1845. Ascending the hill at the back of the 
house by a more direct path than the orthodox route, 
I lingered for a time by the side of one of Shenstone's 
chain of artificial lakes. On its tiny island there was 
still to be seen amid yews and rhododendrons the brick 
foundations of a grotto. A quiet and beautiful spot 
it still is, even amid its neglect. It was for one of his 
root-houses, in what he called " VirgiFs Grove," that 
the poet wrote the verses beginning : — 



Here in cool grot and mossy cell, 
We tripping fawns and fairies dw 



:s dwell. 

Thousands, to whom Shenstone's verses are otherwise 
unknown, have sung or listened with delight to their 
musical setting composed by Lord Mornington, the 



FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 139 

father of the great Duke of Wellington. Alas ! the 
fairies that frisked under the limes and near his crystal 
stream are no more. Great Pan is dead, and the 
Strephons and Corydons, the Damons and Phyllidas, 
with their Doric pipes and crooks and kids, have 
changed their ways. When Hugh Miller visited this 
very spot, for he too refers to the " forlorn brick ruin," 
he kept a sharp look-out for those pastoral nymphs, and 
at last discovered " Cecilia, a ruddy blonde, fabricating 
tackets, and Delia, a bright-eyed brunette, engaged in 
heading a double-double." I was fortunate in meet- 
ing the debonair " Princess Ida." With all his love of 
a conventional pastoralism, of which people were 
beginning to tire, Shenstone was nearer the truth 
when he confessed : — 

'Tis not th' Arcadian swain that sings, 
But 'tis his herds that low. 

Up the stream I proceeded. Here were yews now 
strangely out of place in this neglected wilderness ; 
there, some Scots firs ; and yonder, a group of four 
stately beeches. When I reached the top of the hill 
I was disappointed to find that a haze shut out Shen- 
stone's glorious vistas, which Dodsley extols so much. 
Down again by ferny ways I retraced my steps. As 
the grounds of The Leasowes lay beneath, it required 
little discernment to see that the trees had been 
grouped by a master-mind. I noted particularly the 
fine effect of the Scots firs, with their deep red boughs. 
Shenstone believed in vistas with a glimpse of the 
ruined abbey or of the spire of Hales Owen Church 
appropriately framed in greenery. 



140 FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 

Grand and gloomy is the parish church of Hales 
Owen, with its great Norman arches, its embattled 
tower, and lofty spire. It presents a Gothic exterior, 
owing to the addition of chapels and aisles in later 
times ; but amid its pillared colonnades of massive 
Norman work there dwells a perpetual twilight until 
the eye becomes accustomed to the dim religious light. 
As if in keeping with its mediaeval atmosphere, there 
is preserved a list of vicars and canons of Hales Owen 
since Robert de Crowle, first vicar, 1232. Shenstone 
is buried just outside the church. His grave is dis- 
tinguished by a plain upright stone and recumbent 
slab, the stone simply bearing his name and date, " Ob. 
1 1 Feb. 1763, JEt. 49." At the west end of the church 
a marble mural tablet, surmounted by a plain urn, re- 
cords his virtues in rhyming couplets, beginning : — 

Whoe'er thou art, with reverence tread 
These sacred mansions of the dead, 

and ending with the following tribute : — 

Reader ! if genius, taste refined 
A native elegance of mind ; 
If virtue, science, manly sense, 
If wit that never gave offence ; 
The clearest head, the tenderest heart 
In thy esteem e'er claim'd a part — 
Ah ! smite thy breast, and drop a tear, 
For, know, thy Shenstone's dust lies here. 

I have dwelt so long on Shenstone's environment 
that I must leave to another paper a ramble through 
the poet's works, especially his letters, for, if in his 
poems he displays his " native elegance of mind," it 
is in his correspondence that, like Cowper and Gray, 



FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 141 

he lifts the veil, and shows us himself silhouetted 
against a background of eighteenth-century country 
life. Meantime I must return to Arden, for the day 
is far spent. 

Somehow this ramble in Shenstone's Arcady has 
partaken largely of a pilgrimage to old churches, for 
when I reached Northfield once more I had still time 
to revisit the parish church before being whirled back 
to South Warwickshire. Here, I thought, Gray's 
Elegy might have been written, and yet this church, 
like that of the Elegy, did not materially differ from 
hundreds of others. In the twilight the great old yews 
looked gloomier than ever, and the embattled western 
tower alone stood out against the dim evening sky. 
The church was still open. Amid the deepening 
shadows, three of the seven sanctuary lamps, that I 
had observed in the morning, sent a fitful gleam across 
the chancel and shimmered on the Cross on the super- 
altar beneath the east window. The sanctuary itself 
was bathed in silence, broken only by the pilgrim's 
footsteps ; and, as the rood-screen guarding the choir 
stood out in effective relief, the whole recalled the 
Apocalyptic vision of the seven lamps " which are the 
seven spirits of God," 

That high sacred seven 
Which guard the throne by night, and are its light by day. 

I have returned to Arden, and here the sweet in- 
fluences of Shakespeare, like yonder cluster of the 
Pleiades, would fain lull me into forgetfulness of the 
day's pilgrimage. But I must be loyal to Shenstone 
even in Shakespeare's country ; and so I linger at the 



1 42 FROM ARDEN TO ARCADY 

close of the day over the pages of what, after all, 
Arcadia notwithstanding, appeals to us most — Shen- 
stone's Schoolmistress. As a bit of portraiture it is 
perfect. We see the old dame with her russet stole 
and kirtle, " her cap far whiter than the driven snow," 
and her apron " blue as the harebell that adorns the 
field." You can picture her in summer, seated in her 
garden hymning Sternhold's metrical version of the 
Psalms on " Sabbath's decent eve." And such a 
garden ! 

Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak, 
But herbs for use, 

herbs of " grey renown," sweet marjoram and lavender, 
tufted basil and " pun-provoking thyme," " mary- 
gold of cheerful hue," and rosemary, sweetest of 
names ; " that's for remembrance," as both Ophelia 
and Perdita have reminded us, but who would forget 
Sarah Lloyd and her old herb garden ? The clocks in 
the neighbouring country town are once more chiming 
the four quarters before midnight as I close the book 
in the house of my pilgrimage, and store up another 
memory for after years. 



XI 

SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 



Thou canst not learn, nor can I show 

To paint with Thomson's landscape glow ; 

Or wake the bosom-melting throe, 

With Shenstone's art ; 
Or pour, with Gray, the moving flow 

Warm on the heart. 

Robert Burns. 



SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 

THERE is a perennial charm about the familiar 
letters of the eighteenth century that never fails, 
and when our legislators overwhelm us in these days 
with endless schemes of sociological, sanitary, educa- 
tional, and other reforms, we sometimes marvel to 
think how far we still seem to be from Utopia. No 
wonder that by winter fires we try to forget all this 
huge congestion, and with something like a sigh of 
relief turn to these old calf octavos in their faded gold. 
Some of them may have been written in troublous 
times, but you view the battle afar off down a long 
perspective of years, and an old-world atmosphere 
clings to their pages. To you these volumes speak only 
of " the good old days," and you are in the mood to 
agree with Joseph Addison's immortal fox-hunter, that 
there has been no good weather since the Revolution. 
You listen complacently to his garrulous talk of " the 
fine weather they used to have in King Charles the 
Second's reign." Fox-hunters were inclined to be 
Tories, Shenstone tells us. In the epigrammatic 
passage, already quoted, he went a little further when 
he said that " the world might be divided into people 
that read, people that write, people that think, and 
fox-hunters." Of course, Shenstone ought to know, 
for one does not forget that his literary godfather 
l 145 



146 SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 

was William Somervile, the fox-hunting squire and 
poet of Arden, who did all three, as well as ride 
to hounds. In course of time it fell to the youth- 
ful Shenstone to celebrate Somervile in elegiac verse 
and commemorative urns, all in the fashion of the 
days of Queen Anne. Such gentle thrusts as I have 
noted above are characteristic of Shenstone, as, for 
example, where in another passage he satirises the sub- 
jects sometimes selected by his contemporaries for 
" occasional poems " : 

On his dog, that growing corpulent refused a crust when it was 

offered him. 
On an earwig that crept into a nectarine, that it might be 

swallowed by Cloe. (Happy earwig !) 
On cutting an artichoke in his garden the day that Queen Anne 

cut her little finger. 

Such recollections prompt me to take from their place 
on the bookshelves the handsome volumes published 
by Dodsley in 1764, containing " the works in verse 
and prose of William Shenstone, Esq." They in turn 
recall my own autumnal ramblings in Shakespeare's 
and Somervile's Arden and Shenstone's Arcady, as de- 
scribed in the preceding papers. The vignette illustra- 
tion on the title-page is characteristic of the man, a 
kingfisher standing on the bank of one of Shenstone's 
streamlets, having beneath, in ribbon or scroll form, 
the motto — 

Flumina amem, sylvasque inglorius. 

Alas ! This edition of his works was not published 
until the year after his death. How proud Shenstone 
was of the kingfishers that haunted his streams ! The 



SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 147 

little halcyon's azure plume steals into his verses, and 
is emblazoned on his shield, " Or, three kingfishers 
proper" and so on. It has always been a pretty con- 
ceit of the poets this dabbling in heraldry. One thinks 
of Burns's woodlark perched on a sprig of bay tree 
with the motto, " Wood notes wild," quoted from 
Milton's reference to " Sweetest Shakespeare " in 
// Penseroso. Burns's heraldry, like Shenstone's, was 
elegant trifling. Scott of Abbotsford, as became the 
founder of a family, took it more seriously with his 
gay quarterings of mullets and golden crescents. 

But I am wandering from Shenstone's letters. 
Dodsley's collection dates from 1739, when the poet 
was twenty-five, to 1763, the year of his death. In 
the second letter of the series we are introduced to his 
housekeeper, Mrs. Arnold, who took under her 
motherly wing the whole care of the farm, the 
chickens, and the calves. Of her kindness as a nurse, 
" her assiduity to the injury of her health," Shenstone 
writes as generously as Cowper did of Mrs. Unwin. 
I expected to meet at The Leasowes an old-world 
housekeeper with at least a Cranford air about her ; 
but instead, there flashes across my inward eye the 
very modern vision of the scientific yet debonair 
" Princess Ida," with a background of " sweet girl 
graduates " waving some kind of glorified dumb-bells 
in the interests of public health. Then I am reminded 
of " the nut foods," and mentally compare them with 
the menu at "The Angel " or " The Rose and Crown." 
I wonder, too, if the naileresses are still as pretty as 
Hugh Miller's Cecilia and Delia ; but, of course, Mr. 
Shenstone could not marry a naileress, and so he 



148 SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 

peoples his groves with nymphs that are only to be 
seen on the canvas of a Boucher or Watteau. He him- 
self remains unwed. Johnson says that he might have 
obtained the hand of the lady to whom his Pastoral 
Ballad was addressed. Very tenderly he describes his 
parting with Phyllis : — 

She gazed, as I slowly withdrew, 
My path I could hardly discern ; 

So sweetly she bade me adieu, 

I thought that she bade me return. 

How tenderly, too, he dedicates the beauties of The 
Leasowes to the lady of his heart : — 

Not a shrub that I heard her admire 
But I hasted and planted it there, 

while all the time good Mrs. Arnold had to put up 
with all manner of discomfort. From Johnson we 
learn that " his house was mean, and he did not im- 
prove it ; his care was of his grounds. When he 
came home from his walks, he might find his floors 
flooded by a shower through the broken roof, but could 
spare no money for its reparation." This certainly 
was not a home for Phyllida, not a home for "a 
nymph of higher degree." 

" Dr. Nash informs us," writes Isaac Disraeli, " that 
Shenstone acknowledged that it was his own fault 
that he did not accept the hand of the lady whom he 
so tenderly loved ; but his spirit could not endure to 
be a perpetual witness of her degradation in the rank 
of society, by an inconsiderate union with poetry and 
poverty." 



SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 149 

And so Shenstone continued, as Johnson tells us in his 
grand style, 

" To point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to 
entangle his walks, and to wind his waters ; which he 
did with such judgment and such fancy as made his 
little domain the envy of the great and the admiration 
of the skilful — a place to be visited by travellers and 
copied by designers." 

The ^300 a year left him by his mother — one of the 
Penns of Harborough — which would otherwise have 
been amply sufficient in the early Georgian period, 
was thus sunk in transforming his farm into an 
eighteenth-century Arcadia. The sequel was inevit- 
able. 

" In time," says Johnson, " his expenses brought 
clamours about him that overpowered the lamb's bleat 
and the linnet's song ; and his groves were haunted by 
beings very different from fauns and fairies. He spent 
his estate in adorning it, and his death was probably 
hastened by his anxieties." 

These were the days when men of letters were re- 
warded with Government posts, but in that direction 
Shenstone had long looked in vain ; preferment 
never came his way. Referring in a letter, dated 9th 
July, 1743, to the battle of Dettingen, that had been 
fought a few weeks before, he slyly asks : — 

" What think you of the battle ? Are not you so 
much in love with our King that you could find in your 
heart to serve him in any profitable post he might 
assign you ? " 

The profitable post never was assigned, notwith- 
standing all the " big-wigs " (I use the term in an 



i 5 o SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 

eighteenth-century sense) that visited The Leasowes. 
" Everyone gets preferments but myself," he writes ; 
and it must have been with a sigh that, after enlarging 
on the pleasant possibilities of a dear friend " squat- 
ting himself down upon a fat goose living in Warwick- 
shire," while warning him at the same time not to 
invest in a black velvet waistcoat or breeches on the 
mere prospects, he proceeds : — 

" For my part, I begin to wean myself from all 
hopes and expectations whatever. I feed my wild 
ducks, and I water my carnations ! Happy enough if I 
could extinguish my ambition quite, or indulge (what 
I hope I feel in an equal degree) the desire of being 
something more beneficial in my sphere." 
The same something wanting in his life reveals itself 
in his verse as in his prose. " Like some lone halycon " 
he lived his life at The Leasowes. 'Tis said that if 
he had lived a little longer — for he died at forty-nine — 
he would have been assisted by a pension. There was 
something of the fatalism of the Celt about Shenstone. 
In turning over the pages of his fensees, for they are 
more of the nature of detached thoughts than of 
essays, I came across this one. " The words ' no more ' 
have a singular pathos, reminding us at once of past 
pleasure and the future exclusion of it." Yes, the 
pathos of the old Celtic wail, 

Cha till, cha till, cha till mi tuille. 
I return, I return, I return nevermore. 

He, too, like Gray, was struck with the Ossianic 
message, which Macpherson was then delivering to a 
literary world that did not know what to make of it. 



SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 151 

Since I have mentioned Gray, it may be interesting to 
recall what he thought of Shenstone. Writing to Dr. 
Wharton in 1758, he says, " There is Mr. Shenstone, 
who trusts to Nature and simple sentiment, why does 
he do no better ? He goes hopping along his own 
gravel-walks, and never deviates from the beaten paths 
for fear of being lost." 

This brings me to the point that what may most 
interest many of Shenstone's readers are the contempo- 
rary references to historical and literary events. With 
or without a Government post, he was proud of King 
George the Second at Dettingen. " I find myself more 
of a patriot than I ever thought I was," he exclaims 
on reading an account of the battle. He at the same 
time appreciated the motives of the unfortunate Bal- 
merino as " a friend to the Stewarts, a soldier, and a 
Scotsman." His hatred of Popery strengthened his 
loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty. 

" Resistance to the reigning powers," he writes, 
" is justifiable upon a conviction, that their Govern- 
ment is inconsistent with the good of the subject, that 
our interposition tends to establish better measures, 
and this without a probability of occasioning evils that 
may overbalance them. But these considerations must 
never be separated." 

Lord Balmerio, he thought, was an honest man in 
other respects. 

" One may guess his behaviour was rather owing to 
the misrepresentations of his reason than to any de- 
pravity, perverseness, or disingenuity of his will. If a 
person ought heartily to stickle for any cause, it should 
be that of moderation. Moderation should be his party.' ' 



152 SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 

Here, at least, was none of the Celtic enthusiasm ; 
it was the philosophic view of the average Englishmen 
of the time, the view of the Walpole school, that 
looked upon " The Forty-Five " as pure Quixotism. 
It served its purpose if it at least taught Shenstone and 
others how to pronounce such Scottish names as Cro- 
marty, Balmerino, and Culloden. They did not think 
that a strain of romantic music and poetry, pitched in 
the minor key, would encircle the name of Culloden 
in all time coming. Perhaps they did not know that 
Pope Benedict, loyal to the descendants of King 
Charles the Martyr, was praying that the time might 
come when " we would sing our Nunc Dimittis with a 
glad heart, believing that we saw afar off a happy state 
of things in that island, which was once called the 
Island of Saints." Shenstone believed that the success 
of " the Rebellion " would have meant the restora- 
tion of the Church of Rome. Writing under date 
November 22, 1745, he says : — 

" The rebellion, you may guess, is the subject of all 
conversation. Every individual nailer here takes in a 
newspaper (a more pregnant one by far than any of 
the London ones), and talks as familiarly of kings and 
princes as ever Master Shallow did of John of Gaunt. 
Indeed, it is no bad thing that they do so ; for I cannot 
conceive that the people want as much to be convinced 
by sermons of the absurdities of popery, as they do by 
newspapers that it might possibly prevail." 

The passages in Shenstone's letters that deal with 
literature and men of letters partake more of a per- 
sonal character. How delighted he was, for example, 
to be able to tell his friends that, as he was returning 



SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 153 

last Sunday from church, whom should he meet but 
that " sweet-souled " bard Mr. James Thomson, " in 
a chaise drawn by two horses lengthways," and since 
the author of The Seasons has honoured The Leasowes 
with a visit, Shenstone is " fully bent on raising a neat 
urn to him in my lower grove if Mr. Lyttleton does 
not inscribe one at Hagley before me." Nothing 
pleased him better than a visit from Lady Luxborough ; 
" a coach with a coronet is a pretty kind of phenomenon 
at my door, few prettier, except the face of a friend 
such as you." In 1758 another literary Scot called on 
him — Home, the author of Douglas. He records, too, 
a visit from Warton, the Poet Laureate and historian 
of English poetry. Apropos of Warton's History, it 
may be noted also in passing that Shenstone inspired 
Bishop Percy to publish his Reliques of Ancient Poetry. 
After entertaining a larger company than usual, he 
notes how the silence and solitude are intensified by 
the sound of the pendulum of his clock. Who has not 
experienced this sensation ? 

By day its voice is low and light, 
But in the silent dead of night, 
Distinct as a passing footstep's fall, 
It echoes along the vacant hall. 

Shenstone all his life was a book-lover. We know from 
his letters what books he read. He loved what Lamb 
called his " midnight darlings." He could not be 
without books ; he must own them. In this he differed 
from the gentle Cowper, who was content with a loan. 
If Shenstone was not a voluminous writer, he was, at 
least, a voluminous reader, though he had not the 



154 SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 

erudition of Gray. To use his own expression, his was 
" the innocent amusement of letters." Indeed, I know 
no better apologia for his own work than the following 
sentence taken from his observations " on allowing 
merit in others " : — 

" We must not expect to trace the flow of Waller, 
the landscape of Thomson, the fire of Dryden, the 
imagery of Shakespeare, the simplicity of Spenser, the 
courtliness of Prior, the humour of Swift, the wit of 
Cowley, the delicacy of Addison, the tenderness of 
Otway, and the invention, the spirit, and sublimity 
of Milton joined in any single writer. The lovers of 
poetry, therefore, should allow some praise to those 
who shine in any branch of it, and only range them into 
classes according to that species in which they shine." 

Here we must leave him, a man beloved by his con- 
temporaries in spite of his foibles, one who added a 
gentle humour to his pastoral melancholy. When from 
personal experience he pens a poem on " The poet and 
the dun," he prefaces his lines with the following 
quotation from Shakespeare : — 

These are messengers 
That feelingly persuade me what I am. 

True, Shakespeare did not use the word " messengers," 
but that is the humour of it. One can imagine the 
" feeling " epithets applied to the impecunious poet 
by those " beings," as Johnson called them, whose 
clamours overpowered " the lamb's bleat and the 
linnet's song." Shenstone reduced politeness to a fine 
art ; he was so painfully courteous, and yet we can 
fancy that there was a twinkle in his eye as he solemnly 



SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 155 

explained how on one occasion, having lost his way, he 
tried to discover the exact word to use in accosting 
wayfarers. As I have already noted in " Evenings in 
Arden," even he was not altogether happy in his salu- 
tations, or compellations, as he more correctly styled 
them, for when he addressed a man, whom he met, as 
" Honesty," the fellow in reply " directed me to follow 
a part of my face, which I was well assured could be 
no guide to me, and that other parts would follow of 
consequence." 

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well in Hales Owen 
churchyard, and his epitaph within the church, as we 
have seen, is singularly graceful. It could not be said 
that he slept at his post, for his main grievance in life 
was that he never received one. His works, too, sleep 
gently for the most part on the shelves of secluded 
libraries hid away among the stately homes of England. 
Dodsley's editions still suffice. I should not care to 
read them in any other, the editions handled by his 
friends, and by contemporaries, like Walpole and Gray. 
Johnson's Life of our poet was not unsympathetic, 
although Boswell complained that the Doctor did not 
sufficiently admire Shenstone. Burns extolled his 
verses, and Scott was early attracted to the man, who, 
like himself, had made the desert rejoice and blossom 
as the rose. Isaac Disraeli wrote a warm-hearted vindi- 
cation of the poet's domestic life. Gray visited The 
Leasowes in 1770, and three years later Oliver Gold- 
smith also made a pilgrimage to the same shrine, ten 
years after the poet's death, only to find amid its 
tangling walks and ruined grounds a reflex of his own 
Deserted Village. The estate had been bought by a 



156 SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 

button-maker, who clipped trie hedges, cut down the 
gloomy walks, made vistas, not of church spires and 
ruined abbeys, but of " stables and hogstyes." The 
next tenant was a sea captain, whose taste lay in 
Chinese temples and cage-work summer-houses. He 
thought the place looked lonely, and when this ancient 
mariner had altered The Leasowes to his mind, " it 
only wanted inhabitants to give it the air of a village 
in the East Indies." The poet of Sweet Auburn 
concludes : — 

" Could the original possessor but revive, with what 
a sorrowful heart would he look upon his favourite spot 
again ! He would scarcely recollect a Dryad or a Wood- 
nymph of his former acquaintance, and might perhaps 
find himself as much a stranger in his own plantation 
as in the deserts of Siberia." 

A hundred years and more have passed since then, 
and at The Leasowes, Time, the healer, has toned 
down these later crudities and eccentricities, swept 
away, too, its memorials of Arcady and Cathay. 
Nature has returned to her own ; the noble trees that 
Shenstone planted still adorn his grounds ; and doubt- 
less the halcyon revisits its old streamlets looking for the 
three kingfishers " proper " that once were emblazoned 
on the poet's shield. Even " Princess Ida " states in 
her prospectus that her " College " is situated in 
grounds of poetic fame in the midst of beautiful woods. 
She does not mention the poet's name. Possibly, the 
Lady Principal does not believe in Shenstone's School- 
mistress, for, after all, Sarah Lloyd may have been a 
trifle antiquated in her methods. We forgive " the 
Princess " for her imperfect sympathy ; it is greatly a 



SHENSTONE, A POET OF ARCADY 157 

matter of temperament. And so once again I replace 
the volumes, not this time in their temporary resting- 
place in Arden, but in their permanent home amid the 
goodly fellowship of other dusty volumes in dim gold, 
written by Shenstone's contemporaries, whose names 
I have fondly mentioned in this paper, that glorious 
company of the immortals who adorned an essentially 
literary age. 



XII 
"THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 
MEMORIES OF LICHFIELD 



A city of Philosophers. 

Dr. Johnson. 

Freedom I love, and form I hate, 
And choose my lodgings at an inn. 

Shenstone. 



THE LADIES OF THE VALE " 



MEMORIES OF LICHFIELD 



" T TALF-PAST ten, a fine night, all's well!" 
jrX Such was the cry that rang out into the even- 
ing air as a figure with a lantern hurried round the 
Cathedral close and stopped now and again to pro- 




DISTANT VIEW OF LICHFIELD. 



claim the hour and the weather to no one in particular. 
Here was a survival of times past, an answer to the 
old, old question, " Watchman ! what of the night ? " 
After busy days in the metropolis, I seemed to be 



16: 



1 62 "the Ladies op the vale" 

suddenly carried back into the eighteenth century at 
least. On a Saturday evening in late October I arrived 
at the Trent Valley Station, and, picking out the 
Swan Inn coach, we rumbled slowly along through the 
shadows until, like Johnson and Boswell, " we came 
within the focus of the Lichfield lamps." Two at 
least of the old inns of Lichfield were associated with 
Johnson, " The Three Crowns " and " The Swan." 
It was to the former that Johnson brought Boswell in 
1776, when, after a comfortable supper, Boswell tells 
us that he felt all his Toryism glow in the old capital 
of Staffordshire, as he offered incense genio loci in the 
form of " libations of that ale which Boniface, in 
The Beaux' Stratagem, recommends with such an 
eloquent jollity." Here is the passage : — 

" 'Tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber, 
and strong as brandy, and will be just fourteen years 
old, the fifth day of March, old style." 

Truly a wonderful ale, friend Boniface, for, a hundred 
years later, a brilliant Scottish litterateur thus apos- 
trophised the creamy foam that topped a flagon of 
this same Staffordshire ale : " Is it not whiter than 
Dian's lap, softer than Helen's heart, smoother than 
the cheek of Cytherea ? " Sir John Skelton was young 
when he let himself go in this fashion. 

It was to " The Swan," however, that Johnson 
brought Mr. and Mrs. Thrale and their daughter 
" Queeney " in 1774. While Johnson took Boswell by 
way of Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon on an ever- 
memorable journey, the Thrales chose the more direct 
route by the Holyhead road, old coaching ways fami- 
liar to me. They hired fresh horses at " The Mitre " 



"THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 163 

at Barnet, dined at St. Albans, and spent the night at 
Dunstable. Johnson occupied the stages reading 
Tully's Epistles. Boswell had no notes of this journey, 
but both Mrs. Thrale and Johnson kept brief records, 
Johnson's very brief, as when he writes : " Wednesday, 
6th July. — To Lichfield, eighty-three miles. To the 
Swan." The journal kept by Mrs. Thrale, which 
came into the possession of Mr. A. M. Broadley, and 
has been recently published, gives more details. It 
was a long stage from Dunstable to Lichfield, and 
Mr. and Mrs. Thrale were concerned about Queeney, 
who, however, escaped with nothing more serious than 
" a slight cold and a sore eye." There was no fear 
apparently of an old stager like Dr. Johnson, and, like 
other old stagers, of whom I have read, he appreciated 
the charm of old-time travel when the dawn would 
burst along the heath. 

" Mr. Johnson," writes Mrs. Thrale, " continued in 
good spirits, and often said how much pleasanter it 
was travelling by night than by day. The clock struck 
12 at Lichfield soon after we got in. 

" In the morning of the next day I put off my 
riding dress and went down to the parlour of the Inn 
we slept at in a morning gown and close cap, but Mr. 
Johnson soon sent me back to change my apparel." 
The Doctor's will was law, especially at Lichfield, and 
Mrs. Thrale " acted accordingly." 

With no small pleasure I found that the maid of the 
inn had selected for me one of the suite of rooms occu- 
pied by the Thrales, a spacious room the two casement 
windows of which looked into the old inn garden and 
up to the three beautiful spires of Lichfield Cathedral, 



164 "THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 

" The Ladies of the Vale," as they are poetically called. 
The inn itself is said to date as far back as 1535. It is 
all upstairs and downstairs, connected by long undu- 
lating corridors according to the levels of its rooms. 
Ghostly uninhabited apartments, lit here and there by 
the lamp lights of the great inn yard, lead one off 
another until you reach the eighteenth-century ball- 
room. Here, certainly, was " a pleasing land of drowsi- 
head," whose ancient peace was broken only by the 
Minster bells chiming the quarters all through the 
silent night. 

Like Mrs. Thrale, nearly 150 years ago, I, too, heard 
the clock at Lichfield striking twelve, for the open 
casement windows had a fascination that banished 
sleep. The moon, obscured by clouds, was nearing the 
full, and into the grey, luminous sky rose " The Ladies 
of the Vale," the two florid western spires, dating from 
the fourteenth century, and their younger sister, the 
central spire, said to be the work of Sir Christopher 
Wren, who had been commissioned to replace the 
original spire, destroyed by a fanatical Puritan. No 
other cathedral in England can now show such a pic- 
ture as is here presented — three spires rising up into 
the midnight air from their pinnacled bases of rich 
Gothic profusion. Now the chimes have struck the 
quarter-past midnight, and at half-past twelve I looked 
out hoping to hear the watchman's voice, but the dis- 
tance was too great. The clouds have cleared away, 
and, over the Cathedral, Charles's Wain spangles the 
sky. 

On the Sunday morning the bells of the Minster 
were ringing their Laudate Dominum, praising Him in 




LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL : WEST FRONT. 



1 66 "THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 

the height. We generally associate old cathedrals with 
grey-worn towers, silver-lichened ; but here the red 
sandstone presents a warm, ruddy hue that adds a 
brightness as of sunshine to the richly decorated facade 
of the west front, where the niches are once more 
filled in with effigies of saints and kings. Another 
feature is the spire-lights, particularly of the central 
spire. These spire-lights or windows are characteristic 
of the broach spires of the neighbouring county of 
Northampton, and while Lichfield has a parapet round 
the base of the spire, the design of the windows is 
exactly as in the broach or parapetless spires of the 
Midlands. The effect, especially of the lower windows 
piercing the great central spire, is, under certain atmo- 
spheric conditions, like the baseless fabric of a vision ; 
you marvel at its seeming slender foundations. 

If the Cathedral is beautiful without, it is all glorious 
within. The unusually large clerestory windows send 
a flood of light into the interior ; but down the nave 
and across the transept, and beyond the low reredos 
behind the altar, the eye loves to travel to the old 
painted windows in the apse of the Lady Chapel. At 
Fairford, the mediaeval glass had survived the Reforma- 
tion and the Civil War ; here, Lichfield owes its 
Flemish windows to the dissolution of the monastery 
of Herkenrode, near Liege. The glass, dating from 
1534 to 1539, was purchased in Belgium in 1802 and 
brought to Lichfield. The modern wr ought-iron 
screen and the reredos of marble and alabaster were 
designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, and so constructed as 
to intercept as little as possible the vista of masses of 
deep mediaeval blues and golden greys framed into the 



' C THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 167 

shadows of the distant Lady Chapel, an effect that 
becomes more pronounced as it draws towards evening. 
In 1774 the Thrales visited the Cathedral on a week- 
day ; but there was nothing almost that Dr. Johnson 
could not command in those his later days, and so we 
are not surprised to read in Mrs. Thrale's diary that 
" the Cathedral service, where an anthem was sung 
by Mr. Greene's directions for our entertainment, 
filled up an hour after dinner very properly." How 
delightfully illuminative this is in its very frankness. 
The historic Church of England, the lives of whose 
good men — Donne, Hooker, Herbert — were traced by 
Walton with a plume , " dropped from an angel's 
wing," the church of such Restoration prelates as 
good Bishop Hacket of Lichfield, Jeremy Taylor, Ken, 
and Stillingneet, had fallen into the eighteenth- 
century lethargy : an anthem sung " for our enter- 
tainment " by the Cathedral choir " filled up an hour 
after dinner very properly " ! No wonder that in the 
fullness of the time came the Oxford Movement. 
Even " James Boswell, Esq., from the Hebrides," as 
Johnson jocularly designated him, would not have 
written thus. On Sunday, March 24th, 1776, he 
writes : — 

" I went to the Cathedral, where I was very much 
delighted with the music, finding it to be peculiarly 
solemn, and accordant with the words of the service." 

" Dr. Johnson went with me to the Cathedral in 
the afternoon. It was grand and pleasing to contem- 
plate this illustrious writer, now full of fame, worship- 
ping in ' the solemn temple ' of his native city." 

Evensong is still celebrated in the afternoon, so a,s 



1 68 "THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 

not to interfere with the similar service in the parish 
church in the evening. I have so often found a won- 
derful appropriateness in the Psalms appointed for the 
day in the English liturgy that in beautiful Lichfield 
it seemed for the moment as if the poet- King of Israel 
had been inspired by the Minster, when the choir 
chanted the Quern dilecta, the 84th Psalm, " O how 
amiable are Thy dwellings, thou Lord of Hosts ! " 
The anthem was selected from the 96th Psalm, " O 
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness," set to 
the music of Dr. Hayes. How appropriately both 
words and music interpreted the beauty of Lichfield ! 
The old Minster has survived all its vicissitudes. It is 
difficult to believe that civil war thundered in and out 
the moated close, and that the flicker of camp fires 
was reflected in the Minster Pool. It has seen its 
bell tower burned down, its stained glass destroyed, 
its central spire in ruins, its walls whitewashed. Then 
came the restoration of Charles II, when Bishop 
Hacket set to work to repair the Cathedral, a work 
of eight long years. He lived to re-consecrate the 
Minster, but of the six bells that he had presented to 
the Cathedral one only was hung in his lifetime. We 
are told that " the first time it was rung, the bishop 
was very weak, yet he went out of his bed-chamber 
into the next room to hear it : he seemed well-pleased 
with the sound, and blessed God, who had favoured 
him with life to hear it, but at the same time observed 
that it would be his passing bell, and returning into 
his chamber, he never left it till he was carried to his 
grave." So passed the good Caroline Bishop. Re- 
storers, judicious and otherwise, have tampered with 




><">* 



SAMUEL JOHNSON'S HOUSE, LICHFIELD 



170 "THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 

the stones of Lichfield Cathedral, yet to-day it stands 
as it stood in times past, one of the fairest ecclesiastical 
heritages in England. 

These are memories worth cherishing as we pass 
into the Cathedral Close, and wander through the 
narrow eighteenth-century streets to the square, where 
sits the Doctor among his books, and where Boswell, 
too, is commemorated in a not very happy statue, not- 
withstanding his well-powdered wig, his sword, and 
cocked hat. There was no reason why the sculptor 
should have infused into his work the spirit of Macau- 
lay. As Mr. W. L. Courtney has pointed out, " The 
old idea that Boswell was a stupid man has long since 
been superseded." Jowett, we are told, was fond of 
saying that Boswell was a genius ; but Jowett's friends 
rather suspected that he wished he had a Boswell to 
record his conversation. Be that as it may, that fine 
old Senator of the College of Justice, Alexander 
Boswell of Auchinleck, had some cause for disquietude 
in what he naturally considered the eccentric conduct 
of his son. Boswell one day endeavoured to assure his 
father that the Doctor was a constellation of all the 
virtues. " Yes, James," replied Lord Auchinleck, 
" the Doctor is Ursa Major, and you are Ursa Minor." 

But " the hasting day " has run beyond the time of 
evensong, and I am once more taking mine ease in 
mine inn, looking up now and again at the moonlit 
spires, " The Ladies of the Vale." How pleasant it is 
to muse amid such surroundings, pleasanter still if the 
Dean of Lichfield of old times could be prevailed on 
to call and have a quiet chat. How we could discuss 
the Morocco Question, for example, for was not Dr, 



"THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 171 

Lancelot Addison, English chaplain at Tangier in the 
days of Charles II ? — Tangier, " that costly and useless 
settlement," as Macaulay calls it, which, the great 
Whig historian notwithstanding, ought never to have 
been abandoned, for I am one of those who firmly 
believe in Britain's supremacy in the Mediterranean. 
Perhaps, too, the Dean might have been accompanied 
by his eldest son, Joseph Addison, who was born the 
year before the Dean came to Lichfield. But hark ! 
The clatter of horses approaching the inn has just 
broken the silence. Now there is a bustle in the inn- 
yard. I should not be surprised if the lady that has 
stepped out of the post-chaise were Mrs. Thrale, 
another of " The Ladies of the Vale." Thirteen years 
after her first visit she came again to " The Swan " 
with her second husband, Mr. Piozzi. The " Great 
Bear " was rather surly over this love match, but he 
afterwards made amends with tears in his eyes. And 
so if Mrs. Piozzi came again to Lichfield, it would 
still be to " The Swan," and I should wonder whether 
I might offer Mr. Piozzi some of BoswelPs Stafford- 
shire ale, or whether, to suit his southron palate, I 
must ask the maid to fetch a cup of rich Falernian, 
the wine of Horace, or mayhap a pint of port — 

Such whose father-grape grew fat 
On Lusitanian summers. 

And Mrs. Thrale ? (For I prefer to call her by that 
name.) Would she grace our inn parlour once more, 
the parlour looking out into the garden ? Might we 
speculate as to -whether her modern travelling costume 
would have pleased the dear old Doctor ! Hester 



172 "THE LADIES OF THE VALE" 

Thrale could not look other than charming, with the 
charm that some women, like Diane de Poitiers, never 
lose. We love to picture for ourselves Cowper's 
" dearest coz," Lady Hesketh, or Dean Swift's Stella. 
And so it is with Hester Thrale. By and byT hope 
to remind her of our old friend with the lantern still 
going his rounds ; and perhaps she might be per- 
suaded to accompany me to the Cathedral Close, up 
the hill past Davy Garrick's. How daintily she walks ! 
These old-world ladies had to pick their footsteps 
through many a slough. A Raleigh was not always at 
hand with his cloak, and thus the dainty manner be- 
came natural to them. Yes, madam, time has dealt 
kindly with Lichfield since you were last here. Like 
Hester Thrale, the " Ladies of the Vale " are as 
beautiful as in the olden days ; they, too, have never 
lost their charm and grace ; and yonder is the old 
watchman just passing the doorway of the north 
transept. Listen ! " Half-past twelve, a fine night, 
all's well ! " 



XIII 

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF " THYRSIS " AND 
"THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY" 



Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore 
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, 

And oft suspend the dashing oar, 
To bid his gentle spirit rest. 

Collins. 

O ye spires of Oxford ! domes and towers ! 
Gardens and groves ! your presence overpowers 
The soberness of reason ; till, in sooth 
Transformed, and rushing on a bold exchange, 
I slight my own beloved Cam, to range 
Where silver Isis leads my stripling feet ; 
Pace the long avenue, or glide adown 
The stream-like windings of that glorious street. 

Wordsworth. 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" AND 
"THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY" 

THE will-o'-the-wisp personality of Matthew 
Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy has always been dear 
to me. Amid the quiet backwaters of rural England 
you hope some day to meet him, for every lover of 
Nature who drinketh deep at the elfin springs of 
English literature is himself a scholar-gipsy at heart. 
Oh ! the joys of the footpath way ! Where the bee 
sucks, there lurk I ! Who would not wander, for in- 
stance, through the Forest of Arden with that supreme 
scholar-gipsy, Will Shakespeare, and sleep, as tradition 
says, in summer nights within the porch of some old 
parish church, as at Grendon Underwood, on the way 
from London to Stratford-on-Avon ? 

'Tis a pleasing fancy that Arnold weaves around the 
seventeenth-century story of the poor Oxford scholar, 

Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door, 

not an uncommon experience even at the present day, 
" joined himself," as it is told in Glanvil's book, " to a 
company of vagabond gipsies." Oxford, however, had 
a wistful fascination for the Scholar-Gipsy, as it has 
had to many since his time. He still haunted the 
Cumnor hills, the Wytham flats, and the Berkshire 
moors ; and in Thyrsis the keynote to the whole poem 
is the last line : — 

Our scholar travels yet the loved hill-side. 
175 



176 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 

The one poem is not complete without the other. 
Combined, they take a form, half pastoral, half 
elegiac, dear to the poets of all time. When Sir Philip 
Sidney died, Spenser wrote what he called " a pas- 
torall seglogue " to the memory of Phillisides ; when 
Edward King, a brilliant young scholar of Christ's 
College, Cambridge, was drowned in the Irish Sea, 
Milton dedicated to him his Lycidas, his incomparable 
poem ; even as the death of Arthur Henry Hallam 
prompted Tennyson's In Memoriam. So, too, in 
Thyrsis, Matthew Arnold enshrined the memory of 
his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. For a prototype of 
the Scholar-Gipsy, on the other hand, I always turn 
to the noble closing verses of Gray's Elegy, dedicated 
to the memory of " a youth to fortune and to fame 
unknown." How we love to follow him if we can, in 
the early morn, 

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away, 
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn. 

At noontide he is found, like Gray himself, at the foot 
of a nodding beech, gazing into a brook that babbles 
by. Later he is seen wandering past yonder wood, 
muttering his wayward fancies as he roves. Then 
follows the verse that, to me, seems the very essence 
of Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy : — 

One morn I miss'd him from the 'custom'd hill, 
Along the heath, and near his favorite tree ; 

Another came ; nor yet beside the rill, 
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he. 

We shall see how Matthew Arnold, too, missed his 
Scholar-Gipsy and his " Thyrsis " by the accustomed 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 177 

hill, the favourite tree, the upland lawn, and by the 
skirts of Bagley Wood. 

The charm of Oxford never palls. We are not all 
privileged to be graduates of that great University ; 
rather, as M. Paul Bourget has expressed it, do we love 
its old walls, because we have only looked at them as 
backgrounds to our dreams and imaginings. As in a 
dream, too, we wander amid its mediaeval colleges. 
Like Charles Lamb, we appropriate the tall trees of 
Christ Church and the groves of Magdalen, and in the 
vacation " I fancy myself of what degree or standing 
I please." Sometimes a dim-eyed verger would drop 
a bow as the gentle Elia passed. Wordsworth slighted 
his own beloved Cam to range where silver Isis led his 
stripling feet. John Dryden made the same confession. 
No wonder, then, that its own distinguished sons never 
forgot Oxford, that " exquisite place," as Matthew 
Arnold calls it, " spreading her gardens to the moon- 
light, and whispering from her towers the last enchant- 
ments of the middle age." Oxford, " the adorable 
dreamer," he continues, " whose heart has been so 
romantic, who hast given thyself so prodigally, given 
thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to 
the Philistines ! Home of lost causes and forsaken be- 
liefs." This is the Oxford of our dreams. " I'll tell 
you, Scholar," said Izaak Walton, " when I last sat on 
this primrose bank, and looked down these meadows, I 
thought of them as Charles the Emperor did of the 
city of Florence (Florence, where ' Thyrsis ' died), 
' that they were too pleasant to be looked on, but only 
on holidays.' " When James Howell visited Florence 
in 1 62 1 he also recalled the saying, and now 1 quote 

N 



1 78 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 

it again and apply it to Oxford, for it is only on holidays 
that I can visit " that sweet city with her dreaming 
spires." 

At another time, and in another mood, I should 
have dwelt on Oxford as the adorable mother of John 
Keble and John Henry Newman, and should have 
been satisfied to muse on the rich associations of their 
University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin ; but 
already I have lingered too long if I would follow in 
the footsteps of " Thyrsis " and the Scholar-Gipsy. 

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill, 

is the first line of The Scholar-Gipsy, and " the call " 
tears me away at last from the High Street of Oxford 
in search of the spirit of the wandering scholar some- 
where on the upper river. There he had been seen in 
June above Godstow Bridge, and in June, too, I wan- 
dered through acres of buttercups to Medley Weir, 
past Binsey village, and all that is left of Godstow 
Nunnery — Binsey, associated with Saint Frideswide, 
enshrined in Oxford Cathedral ; and Godstow, where 
the good nuns sheltered Fair Rosamond. The fallen 
May blossom far scattered over the meadows whitened 
the margins of the quiet backwaters. At Godstow is 
the Trout Inn, beloved of oarsmen who haunt the 
upper river, and down a meadow-path, with a vista of 
green pastures and quiet waters and distant hills, 
" the warm, green-muffled Cumnor hills," nestles the 
village of Wytham. Its grey gables, red chimney 
stacks, thatched roofs embosomed in trees, and square, 
embattled church tower beyond, make up a perfect 
English picture. The church is modern, but the win- 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 179 

dows and much of the timber work were brought from 
Cumnor Place. The good old roomy inn at Wytham, 
at the sign of "The White Hart," with its golden 
coronet round the animal's neck, reminded me of 
" homely, hearty, loving Hertfordshire." Oxford men 
delight in telling you of happy days when they would 
start from Medley Lock for Godstow, and past the 
Wytham flats to Eynsham and Swinford Bridge. By 
double-sculling they might reach even Bab-lock-hithe, 
surely the very sanctuary of the Scholar-Gipsy. 

When time and circumstances permit, for few can 
dispense with " the common task," I am never happier 
than when on the tramp ; there is a charm in the 
lonely wanderings of the Scholar-Gipsy that is not to 
be found even in the cultured companionship of a 
" Thyrsis." When alone you may go where you like, 
stop where you like. You do not require to talk when 
you would rather be musing, nor to listen to the irrele- 
vant ripple of the man, however well-intentioned, who 
does not know when silence is golden at Nature's 
shrine, when the Lord of Nature Himself is here in 
His holy temple. I recollect asking one of the kindliest 
and most cultured of souls what he thought of a dis- 
trict which I cherished as being one of the loveliest in 
England. " Ah," he said, " we had so much to talk 
about that I never saw the landscape," a landscape in 
which every house, every tree, were familiar friends, 
a landscape through which a river flows to-day, as it 
has flowed for centuries, not only over its chalky bed, 
but through the finest pages of our glorious literature ! 
And yet what would life be, what would literature be, 
without a Thyrsis, or a Lycidas ? Even in the grandest 



180 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 

and greatest of books, David's lament over Saul and 
Jonathan could ill be spared. " I am distressed for 
thee, my brother Jonathan ; very pleasant hast thou 
been unto me ; thy love to me was wonderful, passing 
the love of women." Similarly we can truly believe 
that the memory of Milton's morning walks with King 
around Cambridge, as recorded in Lycidas, was as 
dear to him as Arnold's touching remembrance of 
Arthur Clough. 

Here came I often, often in old days ; 
Thyrsis and I, we still had Thyrsis then, 

and here on an April morning I returned to my quest. 
That there are two Hinkseys every lover of Arnold 
knows, and from either village you may ascend the 
poet's loved hill-side. 

On that April morning I chose the path from the 
hamlet of South Hinksey, for it is hardly even a village, 
a few straggling farmhouses and thatched cottages of 
grey stone, grey with age like the colleges, and a primi- 
tive old church with a square tower. The apple and 
plum blossoms brightened the orchards, and the grace- 
ful daffodils shed their radiance in the cottage gardens. 

Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm, 

Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns the hill ? 

A brooklet comes down the tiny valley, and to the 
north-east are Oxford's towers, with the amphitheatre 
of Headington Hill beyond. The slopes of the valley 
are bright with spring flowers. The stitchwort nestles 
beneath the bramble, and the cowslips, the Cumnor 
cowslips that the feet of Proserpine never stirred, have 
secured immortality in Thyrsis. Following the track, 



182 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 

the blackthorn hedge, white with blossom, the stitch- 
worts, and the celandines are still my companions. 
Overhead soars the lark, and you stop to watch the 
voluptuous flight of a pair of wood-pigeons across the 
valley to Chilswell copse. How tender is the greening 
of the pollarded willows growing out of the bits of 
marshy waste. Yonder is the great barn of Chilswell 
Farm (the " Childsworth " of the poem). The roof 
is a study in old gold and bronze. Past the farm the 
brooklet still runs noisily over its flinty bed as it rushes 
to fill the duck-pond. Up the grassy slope beyond the 
farm, passing Arnold's " high wood," the gorse is in 
bloom and the wind-flowers star-spangle the slope. 

Rest for a moment on the hill-side and let your eye 
travel down once more to Oxford's towers. How 
finely they compose as we see them from this delightful 
spot, far down beyond Chilswell Farm — the Tom 
Tower of Christ Church, the classic dome of the Rad- 
cliffe Library, the majestic tower of Magdalen, and 
the florid spire of St. Mary's. For an effective group- 
ing of public buildings along its skyline Oxford has 
only one rival in the universe, and that is mine own 
romantic town of Edinburgh, along its historic ridge 
from the Castle to Holyrood House. But listen ! there 
is the crow of a cock-pheasant in the copse, accom- 
panied by the see-saw note of the tit. Yonder over 
the ridge, as I resume my pilgrimage, is Matthew 
Arnold's famous " signal-elm," responsible for all the 
personal soliloquies in Jhyrsis. It is not an elm, by 
the way, but an elm-like oak, estimated to be two 
hundred years old. Some have held that the " signal- 
elm " may have been a tree that formerly stood farther 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 183 

up the hill, while others have associated the tree with 
the elm and its attendant firs that form so conspicuous 
an object on Cumnor Hurst. But the " fir-topped 
Hurst " is referred to later in the poem, and popular 
tradition, supported by the opinion of Matthew 
Arnold's personal friends, points to this lonely tree on 
the way over Boar's Hill to Wootton as the " signal- 
elm." Around that tree Clough and Arnold had 
woven a delightful fancy. As Arnold wandered up 
the pathway on that night in which the poem opens, 
after a long absence, he missed the tree. 

Against the west — I miss it ! is it gone ? 
We prized it dearly ; while it stood we said 
Our friend, the Gipsy-Scholar, was not dead ; 
While the tree lived on, he in these fields lived on. 

Arnold missed the tree, and he sadly missed Clough. 
" Thyrsis of his own will went away." It irked him 
to be here, says his friend ; 

His piping took a troubled sound 
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground. 
He could not wait their passing, he is dead. 

Perhaps Clough took the Oxford Movement too 
seriously, if we may so interpret these lines ; but the 
son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby was prepared to wait the 
passing of the storm. In the famous passage already 
quoted, Arnold speaks of Oxford as the " home of lost 
causes." In his essay on Culture and Anarchy he says 
" the Oxford movement was broken, it failed, our 
wrecks are scattered on every shore." Even Matthew 
Arnold did not live to see the passing of the storm. 
Its effect for good was a reverential improvement in 



1 84 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 

the dignity and order of divine service ; its less satis- 
factory effect, perhaps, was, mainly on the part of the 
clergy, a rigid ecclesiastical isolation in the attitude of 
the Anglican Church to the other Reformed Churches. 
With his sincere love for the Church of England, 
Arnold resented these storms, especially when 
" Thyrsis " was whirled into the vortex. But 
" Thyrsis " had not gone over to Rome. The Oxford 
Movement had rather a contrary effect in his case. 
Clough's searchings of heart led, we are told, to a 
gradual abandonment of his early creed. " Thyrsis 
of his own will went away." He resigned both his 
tutorship and fellowship of Oriel. He went to Paris, 
where he met Emerson, and by and by he went to 
America, where he was again welcomed by Emerson. 
Later, his friends obtained for him an appointment in 
the English Board of Education, but it was not for 
long. 

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go ? 

For a time he gave whole-hearted attention to his 
public duties, and then he was " ordered south," to 
die, like Keats, in Italy. The passing of " Thyrsis " 
was a great blow to Arnold, and here in their common 
haunt he recalls the names of places dear to them both, 
dear to every son of Oxford — Eynsham, Sandford, over 
against Iffley, and the Wytham flats. " Thyrsis " is 
gone, and with the passing of the tree, the spirit of 
the Scholar-Gipsy haunts the loved hill-side no more. 
The poet's reverie is disturbed by a troop of Oxford 
hunters going home. They prefer the bridle-path of 
the track by Chilswell Farm to the King's highway. 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 185 

and to avoid their impetuous onset down the hill the 

poet turns aside into a farther field and sees once 

more — 

Back'd by the sunset, which doth glorify 
The orange and pale violet evening sky, 
Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree ! the Tree ! 

How he longed to tell " Thyrsis " that the tree still 
stood, but " Thyrsis " had gone, while the Scholar- 
Gipsy still haunts these woods and fields. Late in the 
afternoon I returned to Oxford after my quest. 

The next morning I resumed my pilgrimage. Shep - 
herds had met the Scholar-Gipsy on the Hurst in 
spring ; and in spring, too, I thought to find him on 
the Hurst. This time I took the path by the causeway 
across the meadows from Osney towards North or 
Ferry Hinksey, with its quaint old Norman church and 
ruined cross. Up the hill past ploughed fields and fields 
green with winter-grown wheat, past gamboge- 
coloured barns, the path leads to Cumnor Hurst, with 
its familiar clump of trees, a few picturesque Scots 
firs guarded by an old elm. The very name " Hurst " 
has a charm about it reminiscent of the virgin forests 
of Saxon England. Across the bent there comes " the 
music of the pack," that reminds me of Somervile, 
the sportsman-poet of England, and sure enough 
sheltered beneath the Hurst there are the kennels of 
a beagle club. The wind-flowers and the Cumnor 
cowslips still brighten the hill-side, and on the ridge 
the peewits and whins are a change from the well- 
ordered meads of the Thames Valley. From Cumnor 
Hurst half of England seems unrolled before you. 
How delicate is the shade of blue that on the extreme 



1 86 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 

western horizon indicates the Cotswolds and Glou- 
cestershire. Yonder runs the Bath road, and to the 
north-east the Chilterns are shrouded in a dim summer- 
like haze, veiling many a beloved spot familiar to me 
amid " the thorny woods of Buckinghamshire." Away 
to the south I dream of a land where " at some lone 
alehouse in the Berkshire moors " the rustics would 
meet the Scholar-Gipsy seated on the warm ingle- 
bench. Alas ! some day there will be no Cumnor Hurst 
unless prompt measures are taken to preserve this 
literary haunt, for a large brick-work is eating its way 
into the side of the hill farthest from Oxford. Surely 
Oxford will wake up before it is too late. The amenity 
of the whole countryside from the two Hinkseys, right 
up to Foxcombe Hill and Cumnor Hurst, should be 
jealously guarded by all lovers of Oxford. 

But I am now within sight of Cumnor Church, re- 
calling a former visit in June, when the vicarage garden 
was gay with white clematis and red hawthorn. 
Cumnor Church and Hall have a universal interest, 
due to the fact that they are for ever associated with 
the romance of Kenilworth. Sir Walter Scott tells us 
that Mickle's ballad of Cumnor Hall, and especially the 
first stanza, had a peculiar species of enchantment for 
his youthful ear, the force of which, as he writes 
Kenilworth, was not even then entirely spent. But no 
longer does 

The moon, sweet regent of the sky, 

silver the walls of Cumnor Hall, 

And in that manor now no more 
Is cheerful feast and sprightly ball. 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 187 

The manor was razed to the ground, and at the west 
end of the churchyard, in the wall of which are still 
to be seen the remains of a fireplace, there is a meadow 
in which one can trace the ground plan of Cumnor 
Hall. Yonder is a row of ancient trees, indicating an 
avenue. In pre-Reformation times the manor be- 
longed to the Abbots of Abingdon, and at the foot of 
the meadow the fishpond still survives the days when 
the monks were supplied with fish " on Fridays, when 
they fasted." 

The old church itself, with its square embattled 
tower, dates from the thirteenth century. It contains 
the usual " goodly pleasant things " that we look for 
in an old English parish church — a chained Bible, a 
Jacobean pulpit, poppy-headed stalls, and a chantry- 
chapel built early in the fourteenth century, wherein 
two abbots were buried. Add to these a quaint statue 
of Queen Elizabeth and a fine memorial tomb on the 
north side of the chancel containing an ancient brass, 
on which are written the virtues of Anthony Foster, 
for the true story of Amy Robsart is wrapt in mystery. 

With the brilliancy of that April afternoon the blue 
of the distant horizon became more intense as I left 
Cumnor village for Bab-lock-hithe. The path leads 
through a hawthorn-bordered lane, then through a 
field-gate, and down the centre of a wide, grassy wil- 
derness, where the track for a horse is alone visible, a 
bridle-path, in short. Its generous margins would 
form a veritable paradise for gipsies. Intermingled 
with the hawthorn not yet in bloom are the earlier 
white sprays of the blackthorn. I have met this 
charming blossom everywhere during my pilgrimage. 



1 88 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 

Here there is pure air, pure typical English country, 
with nothing around but tree-fringed estates. Again 
I hear the cheery crow of the cock-pheasant. On this 
April day I note butterflies for the first time. The 
larks are everywhere as usual, and now that the sun 
has burst forth so joyously with a summer-like heat, 
were it not for the bare elms, one might wonder 
whether winter ever reigns at Bab-lock-hithe. Pass- 
ing another gate, I have arrived at " the stripling 
Thames," meandering through green, lush, smiling 
meadows. Yes, it is spring at last. The " frail-leaf'd 
white anemony " is here, and the gorgeous marsh- 
marigold, and the pollarded willows with their shim- 
mering leaves. Here, too, the west wind blows, and 
yonder is the new moon, all sweet things. The 
Scholar-Gipsy might have met that other scholar- 
gipsy, George Borrow, just at such a spot as this, but 
instead 

Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, 

Returning home on summer nights, have met 

Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, 
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet 
As the punt's rope chops round. 

One might wander on indefinitely through this Arca- 
dian land, for the Thames may be traced far beyond, 
to where, for example, it laps the walls of sweet 
Lechlade after receiving contributions from the de- 
lightful trouting streams of the distant Cotswolds in 
John Keble's country. But it draweth toward even- 
tide. The new moon is becoming stronger as the day- 
light fades, and so after a brief rest at " The Chequers" 
on the further side of the river I recross the rope ferry. 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 189 

On the return journey I noted that the bridle-„paht 
was in some places purple with wood violets, and in 
others like a Scottish moorland road with its grassy 
bents, Scottish save for the white flints scattered over 
the rough pathway. 

As I reached once more the Cumnor ridge the sun 
was setting in a blaze of glory over the Cotswolds and 
beyond the great ocean of level woodlands in the 
direction of the Bath road. The landmarks of Tbyrsis 
and The Scholar-Gipsy are like old friends, especially 
the clump of firs on Cumnor Hurst. 

On my homeward way, as I wandered over the 
Hurst, I returned to the thought that these two 
poems, like other great elegiac poems, seemed to form 
the record of a love passing the love of women. In- 
deed, how little there is of womankind in either poem 
The references are as shadowy as the groups under the 
dreaming garden trees, save, perhaps, the reference to 
the girl who unmoored the skiff above the Wytham 
flats. If you would learn something of Matthew 
Arnold's womankind, you must turn to some of his 
other poems, Urania or A Modern Sappho — proud 
Urania with the " gay unwavering deep disdain " of 
her lovely eyes — Urania, who could love — 

Those eyes declare — 
Were men but nobler than they are ; 

and Sappho, whose fickle lover never fathomed the 
depths of that love with which he was toying, drawn 
away by a passing fancy of black hair and a wreath of 
white heather. Arnold's Sappho is a noble vignette 
picture of a great-hearted woman. We can imagine 



190 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSlS" 

his type, a woman intellectual and capable, but with 
a woman's warm heart shining through her every 
action, a woman filled with a love that is sacred in its 
purity, a love that has borne the stress and heat of the 
day. A quarter of a century ago, it must have been, I 
copied into a scrap-book the following lines : — 

Let her have her youth again — 
Let her be as she was then ! 
Let her have her proud dark eyes, 
And her petulant quick replies. 
Let her sweep her dazzling hand 
With its gesture of command, 
And shake back her raven hair 
With the old imperious air. 
As of old so let her be. 

These lines from Tristram and Iseult still appeal to 
me. They have Matthew Arnold's note of distinction. 
They do not necessarily express regret ; for the per- 
fect love grows only deeper with the years ; rather do 
they seek to cherish and record a pleasing memory of 
bygone youth. " As of old so let her be ! " 

Once more I am following the track " through the 
moonlight on this English grass." One can pick a line 
here and there for every stage of this pilgrimage. 
Cumnor Hurst is now behind me ; The Tree, I know, 
crowns the hill ; and so the Scholar-Gipsy still must 
haunt his loved hill-side. What would Oxford be with- 
out Matthew Arnold ? It is a wonderful tribute to a 
modern poet that he should interpret so well the spirit 
of the place. At last Oxford lies beneath me as I re- 
trace my steps down the slope to North Hinksey 
Church. Matthew Arnold has been my sole guide 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF "THYRSIS" 191 

during these pleasant wanderings. Let him describe 
the closing scene in his own matchless way : 

In front 
The wide, wide valley outspreads 
To the dim horizon, reposed 
In the twilight, and bathed in dew, 
Cornfield and hamlet and copse 
Darkening fast ; but a light 
Far off, a glory of day, 
Still plays on the city spires ; 
And there in the dusk by the walls, 
With the grey mist marking its course 
Through the silent, flowery land, 
On, to the plains, to the sea, 
Floats the imperial stream. 



XIV 
FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 



THE WINDOWS 

Lord, how can man preach Thy eternall word ? 

He is a brittle crazie glasse : 
Yet in Thy temple Thou dost him afford 

This glorious and transcendent place 

To be a window, through Thy grace. 

But when Thou dost anneal in glasse Thy storie, 

Making Thy life to shine within 
The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie 

More rev'rend grows, and more doth win ; 

Which else shows wat'rish, bleak, and thin. 

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one 

When they combine and mingle, bring 
A strong regard and aw : but speech alone 

Doth vanish like a flaring thing, 

And in the eare, not conscience ring. 

Herbert's " Temple " (1633). 



FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 

THE Church of St. Mary, at Fairford, in Glouces- 
tershire, is, like Shakespeare's joyous realm of 
England, a precious stone set in a silver sea. It dates 
from the time when the sombre Norman and early- 
English churches, with their dim religious light, were 
being transformed into the lantern churches of the 
Tudors, when chancel, nave, and transepts glowed from 
end to end in golden and jewelled splendour from the 
great emblazoned windows that were the feature of 
the Perpendicular period. While the churches survived 
the storms of centuries and the Civil War, it was not 
to be expected that the frail memorials in glass of 
martyrs, kings, and sainted eremites could withstand 
the pikes and muskets of the Puritans, and so the com- 
plete series of mediaeval painted windows at Fairford 
is unique in England, their only rivals being the series 
at King's College, Cambridge. Where other parish 
churches must perforce be content for the most part 
with modern glass, Fairford thus boasts her mediaeval 
ruby-reds and blues, hues of sunrise and sunset, vistas 
of heaven, and crude, terrible visions of hell, wonderful 
backgrounds of ancient architecture, pictures of saints 
and prophets and early fathers enshrined in silver- 
toned canopies. 

Amid these legacies of the past one cannot forget 

195 



196 FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 

that Fairford was also the birthplace of John Keble, 
the George Herbert of the nineteenth century, pastor 
and poet, retiring and elusive, and yet one of that small 
band of earnest men who succeeded in shaking the 
Church of England to her foundations. This was the 
double interest that prompted me on a bright morn- 
ing towards the end of May to set out from Oxford 
for Fairford. Walking up the historic High Street of 
Oxford it was impossible to pass without the deepest 
interest the Laudian porch of the University Church 
of St. Mary, with its twisted pillars like the baldachino 
of St. Peter's at Rome, a Renaissance porch forming 
the entrance to a Gothic church, and yet one forgets 
the incongruity on account of its beauty and associa- 
tions. 

But it is of the Fairford and not the Oxford St. 
Mary's that I am writing, and so I leave the dream- 
city of Tbyrsis and The Scholar-Gipsy far behind. 
Following westward the course of the Thames, I must 
pass unvisited beautiful Kelmscott, the " earthly para- 
dise " of William Morris. At Lechlade I lingered for 
a while in the churchyard where Shelley in a calm 
summer evening in 1815 wrote a poem full of the 
haunting peace of Collins's Ode to Evening, and 
dreamed of Lechlade spire. This quiet Cotswold 
village was flooded with sunshine as I leaned over the 
parapet of its thirteenth-century bridge and rested my 
eyes on the green meadow-lands of the stripling 
Thames with its pollarded willows and graceful poplars 
and a wide vista of flat country beyond, bounded by 
wooded heights far to the south. On the way to Fair- 
ford the great chestnuts were almost regal in their 







/■ 



*/r >, 



FAIRFORD CHURCH IN THE HOMELAND OF JOHN KEBLE 

" A precious stone set in a silver sea." 



198 FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 

beauty, loaded as they were with their pink-and-white 
spire-shaped blossoms. 

Like Lechlade, Fairford has its little market square 
and old Georgian inns. Back from the square, and 
close to the gates of the manor, the church is situated 
near the banks of the Coin, amid a wilderness of leafy 
beauty. The church itself is a handsome late Perpen- 
dicular structure, dating from the end of the fifteenth 
century. Its leading external feature is a fine square 
central tower, crowned with parapets and pinnacles. 
Even though there were no painted windows at Fair- 
ford, the finely carved screens, stalls, and misericordes, 
all late fifteenth-century work, would have amply re- 
paid a visit. The story goes that the church was built 
for the windows ; that in the fifteenth century John 
Tame, a merchant, had captured an argosy bound for 
Rome containing a cargo of stained glass. Tame had 
already purchased the manor of Fairford, and imme- 
diately thereafter began to rebuild the parish church 
in a style befitting the glorious legacy he proposed to 
dedicate to the service of the church. This account 
is somewhat legendary ; but the glass, like that at 
King's College, Cambridge, shows the influence of the 
Flemish school, with its heavy masses of colour, as 
distinguished from the delicate silver tones of an 
earlier period, specimens of which still scintillate from 
the tracery lights of some old parish churches. The 
upper lights of the east window are wholly occupied 
with a painting of the Crucifixion ; the lower repre- 
sents events immediately preceding Calvary. One 
notes that the crosses are tau-shaped (T), instead of 
the Latin form. The windows in the north or Lady 



FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 199 

Chapel appropriately illustrate the life of the Blessed 
Virgin, while the south, or chapel of the Blessed Sacra- 
ment, is dedicated to the memorable scenes after our 
Lord's resurrection. In the windows of the nave are 
represented Old and New Testament types, Moses, 
David, Solomon, Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, the 
Latin Fathers SS. Jerome, Gregory, Ambrose, and 
Augustine, and even certain of the Roman Emperors 
in their role as persecutors of the Church. 

The west window, the largest in the church, is de- 
voted to a powerful conception of the Day of Judg- 
ment. The upper lights of the window suffered from 
over-restoration, but although this part is modern, the 
whole effect is very striking. The scheme is Miltonic, 
— in the upper half, the Empyreal Heaven, 

And, fast by, hanging in a golden chain 
This pendant world, 

in the lower half, chaos and " the nethermost Abyss." 
The Saviour sits enthroned in heaven, with the earth 
as His footstool. He is surrounded by a wide rainbow- 
coloured aureole of the hosts of heaven, saints, and 
angels, and bears in one hand the sword of vengeance, 
and in the other a lily. The globe on which His feet 
rest is of deep carmine encircled with clouds. In the 
lower window, golden steps lead up to heaven. St. 
Michael, in the lower central light, with wings out- 
spread, and holding the scales of judgment, presides 
over the eternal destinies. Immortal souls are being 
weighed in the balance, and those found wanting are 
consigned to the nethermost Abyss. I hesitate to de- 
scribe this part of the great window. Those mediaeval 



200 FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 

priests and painters had no doubt in their own minds 
as to the awful realities of everlasting torment. Here 
there is none of the Miltonic sublimity of the fallen 
archangel about Satan. Hades is an underworld 
peopled with green and scarlet demons torturing lost 
souls. I have seen the photograph of a painting of the 
Last Judgment by Hans Memling in St. Mary's 
Church, Dantzic, very similar in design, which would 
seem to support the theory of the foreign origin of the 
Fairford windows. On the other hand, I understand 
that on the west wall of Chaldon Church, Surrey, there 
was discovered in 1870 under whitewash a fine medi- 
aeval fresco in terra-cotta colouring representing " the 
ladder of the salvation of the human soul and the road 
to Heaven." In this wall painting there are the same 
grim pictorial representations of eternal punishment, 
and also of the joys of Paradise, that we find in the 
" Doom window " at Fairford. Whether generations 
of village folks were influenced by this object-lesson 
of the wages of sin I know not. Kneeling towards the 
east, the worshippers were oftener face to face with 
the tragedy of Calvary as depicted on the chancel 
window. It is only as they leave the sacred build- 
ing that they are confronted by the Doom window. 
To me it seemed as if the lurid details in the lower 
lights would be overshadowed by the transfigured 
grandeur of the Most High surrounded by cherubim 
and seraphim in everlasting adoration. Nor have I 
noticed any record of what Keble thought of these 
grim representations. This result, at least, the win- 
dows had as a whole. When in 1847-8 Keble was busy 
adorning his new church at Hursley, he wished the 



FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 201 

subjects of the windows to form a connected series 
from the Fall to the Day of Judgment. He was 
always " hankering after Fairford," as he himself tells 
us. Indeed, it was his fond memories of Fairford that 
inspired him to restore Hursley Church. His bio- 
grapher, Sir John Coleridge, says that " he was at that 
time fresh from the noble church at Fairford ; but 
the feeling grew upon him ; nothing that was appro- 
priate could be, to his mind, too beautiful or rich for 
God's house." 

Here, then, at Fairford we have not merely golden 
legends of the early Church, told in " brittle crazie 
glasse," but as George Herbert further puts it in the 
poem which I quote at the beginning of this paper — 

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one, 

a subtle combination of the intellectual and sensuous 
in worship, such as we have in certain forms of church 
music. To appreciate fully this combination one must 
visit the French cathedrals, leaving the sun-bathed 
street flooded with light, for the dim religious gloom 
that fills the solemn aisles until form seems to vanish 
and we are enveloped in an atmosphere of colour alone 
in which the gem-like scintillations of ruby and 
emerald, and the draperies of saints and kings in 
purple and gold, all combine to appeal to the emotions. 
The charm of many a noble window is entirely spoiled 
by its proximity to a great uncoloured window, and this 
is especially the case in our English cathedrals. Form 
is there, clustered capitals, fretted vaults, and carven 
screens ; but only beneath the emblazoned window of 
some secluded Lady Chapel does the worshipper find 



202 FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 

the soothing atmosphere most in accord with the spirit 
of meditation. 

And so I pass from Fairford Church to the author 
of The Christian Tear. John Keble was born at Fair- 
ford in 1792, not at the parsonage house, for his father 
was vicar, not of Fairford, but of Coin St. Aldwyns, 
three miles distant, and resided on his own property 
at Fairford until his death at the age of eighty-nine. 
" Keble House " was pointed out to me, a roomy 
country house, clad with ivy and white clematis, and 
sheltered by its beeches and chestnuts. His friend 
Newman had pleasant memories of Fairford, of its 
garden and tree-surrounded paddock, and of that 
happy family cricle. " Keble's verses," wrote New- 
man, " are written (as it were) in all their faces." It 
was doubtless of his father's garden that he wrote : — 

The shower of moonlight falls as still and clear 

Upon the desert main, 
As where sweet flowers some pastoral garden cheer 

With fragrance after rain. 

For years Keble acted as his father's curate. When 
offered the living of Hursley in 1829 he declined, be- 
cause he could not leave his aged parent. It was not 
until the offer came a second time in 1835, after his 
father's death and when to him the calls of a sacred 
duty were now satisfied, that he left Fairford for 
Hursley. Hence it is that The Christian Tear, com- 
posed in the earlier Fairford days, and published in 
1827, seems to contain so many vignette pictures of 
lovely Cotswold scenery. Behind Fairford Church 
flows the gentle Coin, said to be the finest trouting 
stream in the midlands and west of England. It flows 



FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 203 

for some fifteen miles or so past old-fashioned villages 
and Elizabethan manor-houses until it joins the 
Thames near Lechlade. Keble was familiar with its 
quiet waters as he walked to and from Fairford to 
Coin St. Aldwyns, and, like the fragrance of his own 
" pastoral fields," these quiet waters found their way 
into his poems. Was it up in the wolds that he heard 

The wheeling kite's wild solitary cry ? 

As expressive of his feeling for " lone Nature," what 
can be finer than his verses for the Twentieth Sunday 
after Trinity, beginning : — 

Where is Thy favoured haunt, eternal voice ? 
Coleridge tells us that the passage in this poem, 

The fitful sweep 
Of winds across the steep, 
Through withered bents, romantic note and clear 
Meet for a hermit's ear, 

would seem to have been suggested to Keble as he lay 
on the lee side of the Malvern Hills on a summer even- 
ing in 1822, reading Spenser's Shepherd/ 's Calendar. 
" What a delightful feel it is," writes Keble, " to sit 
under the shelter of one of the rocks here, and hear 
the wind sweeping with that peculiar kind of moaning 
sign which it practises on the bent grass," — " the bents 
sae brown " of our Scottish ballads. It is a curious 
coincidence that in Keble's splendid tribute to Sir 
Walter Scott in a review of Lockhart's Life he inci- 
dentally quotes a passage from Robert Burns, in which 
the poet expresses his delight in walking " in the shel- 
tered side of the wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy 



204 FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 

winter day," and hearing " the stormy wind howling 
among the trees over the plains. It is my best season 
for devotion." 

Apart, therefore, from the point of view of The 
Christian Year as a religious classic, this little volume 
of verse places Keble among the poets of Nature. 
Keble instils into his pages the creed of Wordsworth. 
He, too, has seen meadow, grove, and stream " appa- 
relled in celestial light " and felt that presence " whose 
dwelling is the light of setting suns." Spring and 
autumn were his favourite seasons. Summer was sad, 
because the time of the singing of the birds had ceased 
and the brooklets were dry ; but autumn brought back 
to Nature the robin's cheery note. Red o'er the forest 
peers the setting sun on a brief November day, and 
later still the snowdrops, " first-born of the year's de- 
light," twinkle to the wintry moon. One could go on 
quoting from, or paraphrasing, such passages ; word- 
pictures abound in every poem. 

But Keble was more than a mere dilettante or 
painted - window saint. He lived and worked for 
nearly forty years after the publication of The Chris- 
tian Tear. The founders of the Oxford Movement 
were men of action as well as of contemplation. 
Keble's very first poem in that collection advocates the 
nobility of work, however humble. 

The trivial round, the common task 
Would furnish all we ought to ask. 

Both Newman and Sir John Coleridge bore testimony 
to the infinite labour, learning, and research involved, 
for example, in Keble's edition of Hooker, and to the 



FAIRFORD AND JOHN KEBLE 205 

beauty of his Latin Lectures on Poetry. Dean Stanley, 
after a lapse of thirty years, had not forgotten his help- 
fulness and quiet kindness of manner ; and when, in 
1875, Dr. Pusey asked Dr. Newman (he was not yet a 
Cardinal) to write something by way of preface to 
Keble's collected Occasional Papers and Reviews, he 
replied, " How can I profess to paint a man who will 
not sit for his picture ? " The question conveyed so 
much to those who knew Keble's retiring disposition ; 
and yet Newman draws a portrait of his friend, full 
of tenderness and beauty, recalling his unworldly 
spirit, his delicacy of mind, his tenderness for others, 
his playfulness, the portrait of one, in short, whom to 
know was to love. 



XV 
IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 



The Christian Tear was in the hands of every one, even the youngest 
undergraduate. Besides its more intrinsic qualities, the tone of it 
blended well with the sentiment which the venerable aspect of the 
old city awakened. It used to be pleasing to try and identify amid 
the scenery around Oxford some of the spots from which were drawn 
those descriptions of nature with which the poems are inlaid. 

Shairp's " Studies in Poetry and Philosophy." 



IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 

ONCE again the bells of Magdalen and Merton 
mingle with my waking thoughts, and across the 
meadows, beyond the two Hinkseys, the Cumnor hills 
bound the horizon. The spell of Oxford had again 
drawn me to its grey-worn towers, to thread " the 
stream-like windings " of its glorious street. Last 
night a dim light glimmered in the University Church 
of St. Mary's, and I passed under its famous Laudian 
porch and into the nave, with its historic pews. In 
the north chapel, or vestry, a zealous organist was in- 
stilling into the ears of some youthful choristers the 
beauty of English Church music, and in response their 
soft, fluty voices gradually filled the columned aisles. 
Beyond the glass doors of the stone screen the moon- 
light fell through the south unstained windows in 
chastened radiance on the floor of the empty choir. 
Here in the nave is the pulpit from which John Keble 
preached his famous sermon on the 14th of July, 1833, 
the day which Newman ever kept as the start of the 
great Oxford Movement. Ten years later Newman 
himself left St. Mary's, and afterwards gave to the 
world his impassioned record written in tears. You 
cannot forget the chiselled profile of his saintly face 
as he looks at you from the printsellers' windows in 

Oxford. It was another Cardinal, his friend Manning, 
p 209 



210 IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 

who recalled at the time of Newman's death those days 
at St. Mary's :— 

" When I was twenty years of age, and he (Newman) 
was about twenty-eight, I remember his form and 
voice and penetrating words at evensong in the 
University Church at Oxford. Having once seen and 
heard him, I never willingly failed to be there. As 
time went on, those quiet days passed into the conflict 
and tumult of the following years," — 

quiet days which Newman never forgot. Even the 
snapdragon growing on the walls of Trinity opposite 
his freshman's rooms at one time seemed to him " the 
emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto 
death in my University." 

A kinder fate left to the Church of England and to 
Oxford the rich inheritance of John Keble, and now a 
great college is dedicated to his memory. Years before 
his name was marked out as to be for ever associated 
with Oxford, Keble writes to a friend : — 

" Every time I go there I feel like a miser looking 
over his old chests, and thinking how much money he 
has wasted in his youth ; the last time I was there, in 
particular, I had the temptation very strong upon me 
to stay and plunge myself into the walks, libraries, and 
cathedral services for a year ; but conscience prevailed, 
and I came back to the Cotswolds." 

The remembrance of such associations flitted across 
my memory as I listened, amid the evening shadows, 
to the music of that choir invisible, and watched the 
moonlight flicker across the tomb of Amy Robsart. 
Surely the spirit of Oxford dwells here, of old mediae- 
val, conservative Oxford, dwells, too, in the time-worn 



IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 211 

college quads where Keble noted how the " embattled 
line of shadows hid the moon's white glimmerings." 
But I, too, must break the spell, for one of my reasons 
for returning to this " seat of calm delight," as Keble 
calls it, was to enable me to revisit once more Fairford 
Church and follow the poet's footsteps into his own 
Cotswold country. Last year when I visited Fairford 
the chestnuts were in full bloom ; to-day, in mid- 
April, they are only beginning to unfold their leaves, 
and here and there the blackthorn sprays brighten the 
hedgerows. Even amid the cold weather of April 
Keble House had an air of warmth about it, amid the 
elms, beeches, and chestnuts that sheltered its pastoral 
garden and orchard. 

After the detailed account of Fairford Church in 
the preceding paper, I need only refer generally to 
the impressions of a second visit to its famous windows. 
They are like the open pages of a great illuminated 
missal, of absorbing interest to the antiquary, the 
ecclesiologist, the painter, and the architect of to-day, 
as well as to the generations of priests, pastors, and 
people for whose instruction in righteousness, down 
through five centuries, they have enriched this House 
of God. One might spend days in their examination, 
discovering new beauties in these jewelled commen- 
taries in ruby and emerald. Thus the saints and early 
fathers, with scrolls over their heads, are gorgeously 
enrobed in draperies of salmon-pink or in deep purple 
velvet, forgetful of the camel's hair of the earlier St. 
John or the fisher garb of the saints of Galilee. The 
golden drapery of the Queen of Sheba, wearing a 
crown of paler gold on her head, and bearing a silver 



212 IN THE COTS WOLD COUNTRY 

casket tipped with gold, forms a strikingly effective 
colour-scheme as worked out by these poet-painters of 
the fifteenth century. How exquisite is the crisp 
frosted silver ! Here in another window is a fair, 
golden-haired saint, St. Anne, I think, the mother of 
St. Mary, carrying a pair of doves in a golden cage. 
The artist who painted that beautiful face must have 
had the soul of Francis of Assisi. The Blessed Virgin, 
in contrast, is draped in a blue gown. The west 
window of the south aisle contains another memorial 
of a saint with a beautiful name, Veronica, whose 
handkerchief is said still to be preserved at St. Peter's. 
The poet Gray records, by the way, how he saw this 
relic at Rome on the Good Friday of 1740 ; but in 
this ancient window even the dim, faded representa- 
tion of the handkerchief, with the still dimmer, 
miraculous impression of our Saviour's face, seems of 
such stuff as dreams are made, or like the fairy gossamer 
that clothes the gorse on an autumnal morning. 

Time passes, however, and I must be on my way. 
Not Fairford, but Coin St. Aldwyns was the goal of 
this April pilgrimage — Coin, the Cotswold village of 
which Keble's father was vicar for fifty-three years and 
Keble himself the curate for ten years. The gates of 
Fairford Park stood invitingly open, and although the 
vicar and the postman, the kindly village representa- 
tives of Church and State, both assured me that there 
was no road through the park under the present pro- 
prietorship, the temptation to trespass was too strong. 
After all, 

What have we to do 
With Kaikobad the Great, or Kaikhosru ? 



IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 213 

I felt sure that honest John Tame would not 
grudge me a walk through his policies. With such 
soothing casuistries, or sophistries, if you will, I soon 
found a path that led to the gentle river Coin, through 
the gardens of Fairford Manor, a path by quiet waters 
and lush meadows, dotted here and there with elms 
and beeches, until I reached a cascade where the river 
was cut in two by an islet connected with the two 
sides of the stream by wooden bridges. It would have 
been a delightful place in which to linger if April in 
England had been the ideal April of our dreams. 
Above the cascade the meadows, though fair to see, 
were swampy, and as I wasn't a dry-fly fisher with a 
passport from " The Bull," I took my course up the 
hill towards an obelisk. What the pillar commemo- 
rated I do not know, for a thrifty landlord or farmer 
had encircled it with a crop of winter wheat. From 
this height there is a fine view of the Coin winding its 
serpentine way through the meadows, fringed as usual 
with osiers, beyond which there is a picturesque vista 
of the village of Quenington. A basket hedge of 
twisted osiers separated the spinney from the ploughed 
field, and here I heard the cuckoo for the first time 
this year (22nd April), always a notable event to the 
lover of Nature. Five days earlier — namely, on the 
17th of April — I noticed the swallow at the Moat 
Farm, between Pinner and Harrow, skimming over 
the duck-pond. Alas ! that one swallow did not make 
a summer. Burns's thrush on the leafless bough, sing- 
ing a song on the poet's birthday on the 25th of 
January, 1793, is a familiar, if plaintive, picture, but 
when belated winter still reigns in mid-April our 



2i 4 IN THE COTS WOLD COUNTRY 

summer migrants are not less deserving of our sym- 
pathy. 

Returning to the King's highway beyond the 
obelisk, the road, I found, soon dipped down to the 
Coin and the village of Quenington. The voice of the 
cuckoo was everywhere ; only the naked elms and the 
dull, cloudy sky accentuated the dourness of spring. 
One might have passed Quenington Church without 
comment were it not for its two magnificent Norman 
doorways, carefully preserved from the weather by 
deep wooden porches. They are said to have been 
built under the direction of the monks of Gloucester. 
Framed in their rich deep chevron and beak-head 
mouldings, somewhat similar to the west doorway at 
Ifrley, the sculptured work in the tympanum of the 
north door represents the triumph of Christ over 
Satan and Death, and that of the south door the 
coronation of the Blessed Virgin. Beyond the church, 
the gatehouse of a Preceptory of the Knights of St. 
John is all that is left to remind the pilgrim of the 
ancient Hospitallers of Quenington. Very picturesque 
is the great Gothic gateway, the small postern door, 
and the high-pitched roof of the old gatehouse, which 
now forms an approach to Quenington Court. Here, 
and in the neighbouring villages, one began to note the 
characteristic features of Cotswold architecture, win- 
dows of leaded panes framed in stone mullions, high- 
pitched gables, and tall chimneys. A small limestone 
quarry by the wayside showed that originally these 
houses would be creamy white in colour, but centuries 
had toned them down to grey. " There is no other 
district in England," says the author of Old English 






IN THE COTS WOLD COUNTRY 215 

Country Cottages, " that has expressed so simply and 
so beautifully in terms of building the unity between 
the soil, the dwelling, and its inhabitants." 

A trout splashed in the stream as I crossed the mill- 
race to follow the steep ascent to the Church of Coin 
St. Aldwyns. This church has the familiar square 
tower with corner finials and open battlement. It has 
also a deeply recessed Norman doorway ; but although 
the church is comely, there is nothing otherwise special 
to note from the point of view of the archaeologist. A 
simple pointed arch separates the choir from the tran- 
septs and nave, and the east window, deeply splayed, 
consists of two small lancet-shaped lights. The lover 
of formal gardens, however, will rejoice in the great 
old yews, the clipped box and trim junipers, kept in 
perfect order. Just over the boundary wall there is a 
delightful glimpse of an old Elizabethan manor-house, 
with stone mullioned and transomed windows and 
twisted chimneys. For years it has done duty as a 
" manor-farm," until recently restored into a manor- 
house by Lord St. Aldwyn, better known as Sir 
Michael Hicks-Beach. Only those who have travelled 
in the remoter parts of England can appreciate the 
atmosphere of romance that lingers around a manor- 
farm. As at Coin St. Aldwyns, it is often adjoining 
the church, and you fancy that it must be the vicarage. 
Meanwhile in course of time lands have been joined 
to lands, acres to acres, and the old Elizabethan manor- 
house proving too small has been displaced by the 
great Renaissance mansion-house, built perhaps by 
some ex-Lord Mayor of London, a citizen of credit 
and renown, the successor to the ancient squire, who 



216 IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 

lost all by siding with King Charles against the Parlia- 
ment. 

But I must call a halt, for I can see that this train 
of thought might lead far from the subject on hand. 
This, then, is Coin St. Aldwyns, noted for its trouting 
stream more perhaps than for its association with the 
Kebles. On my return walk to Fairford I passed 
Hathrop Castle, another restored and enlarged Eliza- 
bethan manor-house, and the road to East Leach, one 
of Keble's cures, where across the river a footbridge 
leading to the church is still known as Keble's Bridge. 
The undertaking the care of these curacies, we learn 
from Sir J. T. Coleridge, was indeed a labour of love ; 
" the whole receipts exceeded very little ^ioo a year, 
and I have no doubt fell short considerably of what 
was expended on them." What he thought during 
these long walks from Fairford to Coin he tells in a 
letter written in 1816. " The hours which I spend 
alone, owing to the distance of my cure from home, 
are many, and I have indulged myself in a sad trick of 
filling them up with melancholy presages." 'Twas 
then that he would turn his pastoral melancholy into 
verse, as he does in his poem for the Third Sunday 
after Easter, in which he upbraids himself for being 
sad while he roves along the violet bank : — 

Shame on the heart that dreams of blessings gone, 
Or wakes the spectral forms of woe and crime, 

When Nature sings of joy and hope alone, 

Reading her cheerful lesson in her own sweet time. 

Keble has added for all time an additional charm to 
those outlying Cotswold villages in thus associating 
them with The Christian Tear. Naturally I turned to 



IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 217 

the poems that coincided with the date of my visit — 
namely, that selected for the Second Sunday after 
Easter. Here he incidentally refers to " willow-shaded 
streams," and of a gentle star whose soothing lustre 

streams 

Around our home's green walls, and on our churchway path. 

In the couplet : — 

No sun or star so bright 
In all the world of light 

Keble seems unconsciously to quote Vaughan, just as 
in the next poem, from which I have already quoted, 
he re-echoes good Jeremy Taylor. April had special 
charms for Keble ; he refers to it again and again. 
The Sundays after Easter breathe of spring, as some 
of the earlier Sundays after Trinity suggest the pro- 
mise of richer days in store, when " in the mazes of 
the budding wood " he notes : — 

Where the fresh green earth is strewed 

With the first flowers that lead the vernal dance ; 

and he hears at dewy eve : — 

In the low chant of wakeful birds, 

In the deep weltering flood, 
In whispering leaves, these solemn words — 

" God made us all for good." 

Like the exiled Duke, " exempt from public haunt " 
amid the forest glades of Arden, he finds " good in 
everything." Yet Coleridge tells us that Keble seldom 
spoke of The Christian Tear without something of sad- 
ness and dissatisfaction. The poems unavoidably 
painted Keble's own heart, but with his innate modesty 



2i 8 IN THE COTS WOLD COUNTRY 

he felt that the picture was not a true likeness. He 
did not wish to be thought better than he was, to be 
deemed a saint because he had painted one, and thus 
the good opinion of the world was to him a cause of 
real sorrow. 

If in these later paragraphs the note that Keble has 
inspired is pitched somewhat in a minor key, as if some- 
one were singing a song of willow by Keble's osier 
stream, the memory of the day's pilgrimage is cer- 
tainly not so, for it was one long joy. The beauty of 
Anglican Church music, the glorious colours of the 
painted windows, " the tender greening of April 
meadows," were, as Brother Jasper might have said, 
all sweet things. Yet I must confess that late in the 
afternoon I was not sorry to find that Coin St. Aldwyns 
contained a hostelry which would have pleased Dr. 
Johnson or Shenstone, and that mine excellent host, 
in addition to his primary duties as innkeeper, adminis- 
tered in a fine, sympathetic spirit some of the smaller 
offices of State, generally held by the village school- 
master. 

When I reached Fairford the bells were ringing for 
evensong. I had little time to spare ; but I was anxious 
to see the windows in the grey light, for it was too late 

to watch 

The sunbeams steal 
Through painted glass at evensong. 

The vicar, the clerk, and six of a congregation re- 
minded me of what Keble had to say about Mr. 
Herbert's saint's bell ringing to prayers, for he argued 
that " it is a great mistake to measure the effect of 
daily service altogether by the number of attendants 



IN THE COTSWOLD COUNTRY 219 

on it." In the fading light I noted how the rich 
draperies that were aglow with colour in the morning 
but emphasised the shadows of evening. It was the 
silver tones that told — even in the gloaming they had 
not lost their fascination. At " The Bull " the coach 
was ready to start for the station. Two under- 
graduates of Christ Church " up " for the summer 
term were my only fellow-passengers. They, too, had 
spent the day by the Coin, or rather several days, and 
were eager to discuss the relative merits of wet and dry 
fly-fishing. Their talk was of rivers in Wales and lochs 
in Sutherland. We talked, too, of books and studies, 
for who does not at Oxford ? And when we came 
within sight of the Cumnor hills that locate the ram- 
blings of Thyrsis and The Scholar- Gipsy, I felt that I 
was once more under the spell of the grand old 
University town, " the sacred genius of this place," 
as John Dryden calls it, that made Oxford to him a 
dearer name than his own mother University. 



XVI 
A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 



A poet fond of Nature, and your friend. 

Cozvper 3 s " Retirement.'' 



XVI 

A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 

NO one could have described William Cowper 
more truly than he describes himself in that 
single line from his poem Retirement. Indeed, I can- 
not recall at the moment the name of another poet 
for whom I have the same affection. Cowper was pre- 
eminently the poet of Nature in a more or less con- 
ventional age, and it is the charm of his letters that, 
having once dipped into them, he is " your friend " 
for ever after. I am not forgetting Gray and Shen- 
stone, his contemporaries. These also I number 
among my friends. All three had something in 
common, a certain loneliness about them. Their 
sensitive natures felt the blows and buffetings of a 
world that somehow did not go well with them. 
" Chill penury (of a kind) repressed their noble rage." 
Memories of Gray and Shenstone are recorded in 
earlier chapters of this volume, but this paper and 
those that follow are dedicated to William Cowper, 
who holds the warmest place in my affections. There 
was the shadow over Cowper's life, " Melancholy 
mark'd him for her own," and as we read his letters 
or note the personal touches in his poems, our hearts 
go out to him as they only do to our nearest and 

dearest in times of affliction. 

223 



224 A VIS1T TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 

It was this personal note that was uppermost in my 
mind on a bright autumnal morning as I left the old 
Bucks farmhouse for a raid across the borders into 
Hertfordshire to the pleasant country town of Great 
Berkhampstead, the birthplace of Cowper, and let me 
add here, of Bishop Ken, a still earlier hymnist, the 
friend and relative of Izaak Walton. Over the borders 
and away ! There were no Cheviots to cross this time, 
but the Aston and Tring Hills, parts of the Chiltern 
range, were very good substitutes. The long white 
chalky road climbing the hill, and the green hedges, 
still white with trailing clusters of " traveller's joy," 
are so characteristically English. To quote Cowper's 
own lines : — 

The sloping land recedes into the clouds, 
Displaying on its varied side the grace 
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower, 
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells 
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear. 

In this particular district the spire is not so common ; 
the square embattled tower is everywhere. Thus in 
another passage, describing the effect of the soft music 
of village bells, Cowper writes : — 

And through the trees I view th' embattled tower 
Whence all the music. 

From the top of one of these embattled towers I 
caught my first distant glimpse of Berkhampstead 
Church. Beneath, lay the quaint old houses of North- 
church, in the middle distance gleamed the Grand 
Junction Canal, with its locks and barges, and beyond 
these the square tower of Great Berkhampstead just 
peeped above the distant trees. 



A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 225 

The whole scene was reminiscent of the type of 
English landscape that we associate with the master- 
pieces of Constable. To linger over a book on the 
hot leaden roof of such a tower as that of Northchurch 
on a summer's day " were Paradise enow." But this 
fine old church was not my objective, and so some- 
what reluctantly I descended the belfry stairs into the 
transept, and from thence out on to the open road 
once more. Northchurch village, however, is but an 
extension of Great Berkhampstead. It was not long, 
therefore, before I reached the centre of the fine old 
market town, and pulled up under the shadow of 
the great church of which the poet's father, John 
Cowper, D.D., Chaplain to George II, was rector from 
1722 to 1756. The exterior of the church presents a 
large Gothic structure built of flints, with choir, tran- 
septs, north and south aisles, nave with clerestories, 
and central battlemented square tower. The windows 
in general are Perpendicular in style ; others, again, 
are Flamboyant. The antiquarian will doubtless 
recognise remains of still earlier work in stone and 
brick on the west wall of the north transept ; while 
the lover of Nature will rest his eyes on the glorious 
mantle of crimson Virginia creeper that clothes its 
walls to the south and west. The interior is very im- 
posing. The transepts and choir are shut off from the 
nave by a handsome dark oak rood-screen of Perpen- 
dicular work, and as you enter by the western doorway 
the great cross surmounting the screen stands out in 
strong relief against the dimly lit chancel beyond, with 
its east window of three lights filled in with painted 
glass, and dedicated to the poet himself. The church 
Q 



226 A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 

contains the usual features that we associate with an 
ancient shrine south of the Tweed — old brasses, mural 
tablets, recumbent effigies, heraldic hatchments, and, 
alas ! there is also the only too frequent memorial in 
our parish churches in memory of those who fell in 
the war in South Africa, 1 899-1902. 

I have no great affection for dates, but they are as 
essential to the student of history and literature as a 
knowledge of anatomy is to the painter. It might be 
well, therefore, to remind my readers in a sentence of 
the places and dates connected with Cowper's move- 
ments, so that the sense of proportion and perspective 
may not be overlooked. The poet was born in 1731 
at " the Pastoral House," Great Berkhampstead, in 
Hertfordshire. His schoolboy days date from 1741 to 
1749 at Westminster, although it was not until 1756, 
on the death of his father, as we shall see, that he 
sighed a long adieu to the fields and woods to which 
he was to return no more. The period of his residence 
in London as distinguished from his schoolboy days 
extended from 1750 to 1763. Then followed (1) the 
memorable years at St. Albans, 1763-65 ; (2) the 
two years' residence at Huntingdon, from June, 1765, 
to October, 1767 ; (3) the nine years at Olney, 
October, 1767, to November, 1786 ; (4) the Weston 
Underwood period, which extended to July, 1795 ; 
and (5) the last sad stage in Norfolk, from 1795 to his 
death on the 25th of April, 1800. Cowper himself 
says in one of his letters : " My many changes of 
habitation have divided my time into many short 
periods, and when I look back upon them they appear 



A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 227 

only as the stages in a day's journey, the first of which 
is at no very great distance from the last." 

The poet himself, as everyone knows, was laid to 
rest in Dereham Church, in Norfolk, but there was 
one mural tablet that I looked for and found on the 
south side of the chancel, the monument to the 
memory of Ann Cowper, the poet's mother. The 
tribute to her memory begins with these lines : — 

Consigned to earth lies (young) bereft of life 
The best of mothers and the kindest wife ; 
Who neither knew nor practised any art, 
Secure in all she wished, her husband's heart. 

" The best of mothers ! " William was only six years 
old when she died, and yet what memories he cherished 
of her goodness. Years after (he was then fifty-nine) 
he received the gift of his mother's picture from a 
cousin in Norfolk, and it was on receipt of her portrait 
that he wrote the most touchingly exquisite of all his 
poems : — 

O that those lips had language ! Life has pass'd 
With me but roughly since I heard thee last. 

Rough indeed for that poor " stricken deer that left 
the herd long since." 

I recollect The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, dear 
old Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (who always somehow 
reminds me of Dr. John Brown), remarking that it 
was not the great historical events, but the personal 
incidents that, after all, appealed to us most. " Some- 
thing intensely human, narrow, and definite," he 
writes, " pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more 



228 A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 

readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A 
nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. 
The Royal George went down with all her crew, and 
Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it ; 
but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which 
bears the lines on his mother's portrait is blistered 
with tears." 

As he tells us in that memorable poem, Cowper's 
memory takes him back more than half a century to 
that day when he heard the tolling bell, and saw from 
his nursery window the hearse that bore her away 
from him for ever. 

Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, 
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor ; 
And where the gardener Robin, day by day, 
Drew me to school along the public way, 
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp'd 
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capp'd, 
'Tis now become a history little known 
That once we call'd the past'ral house our own. 

Whether you call it pastoral house, rectory, or 
manse, there is always that touch of pathos. There 
are those who have left the manse for conscience' sake ; 
but we must not forget that there more frequently 
comes a time when the widow and the fatherless must 
leave the home, of a lifetime, it may be, to make way 
for the new incumbent. It was on the death of his 
father in 1756, when the poet was a young man of 
five-and-twenty, that this fact struck him with all its 
force. Some thirty years later he recorded his impres- 
sions on leaving Berkhampstead. The passage occurs 



A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 229 

in a letter dated 1787, addressed to his friend Samuel 
Rose : — 

" When my father died I was young, too young to 
have reflected much. He was rector of Berkhampstead, 
and there I was born. It had never occurred to me 
that a parson has no fee-simple in the house and glebe 
he occupies. There was neither tree, nor gate, nor 
stile in all that country to which I did not feel a rela- 
tion, and the house itself I preferred to a palace. I 
was sent for from London to attend him in his last 
illness, and he died just before I arrived. Then, and 
not till then, I felt for the first time that I and my 
native place were disunited for ever. I sighed a long 
adieu to fields and woods, from which I once thought 
I should never be parted, and was at no time so sen- 
sible of their beauties, as just when I left them all 
behind me, to return no more." 

Tennyson, too, in In Memoriam has given expression 
to the same vain fond regrets on leaving his father's 
rectory at Somersby : — 

We leave the well-beloved place 

Where first we gazed upon the sky ; 
The roofs, that heard our earliest cry, 

Will shelter one of stranger race. 

Henceforth the great church of Berkhampstead be- 
came to Cowper as a dream. Huntingdon, Olney, 
Dereham, each in turn sheltered the poet, and still 
cherish his memory. It is not necessary, however, to 
visit these shrines in order to keep in touch with 
Cowper, to breathe the atmosphere of his poems. 
Throughout the length and breadth of the land there 
are few Sundays on which his gentle muse doth not 



230 A VISIT TO COWPER'S BIRTHPLACE 

contribute to the service of praise ; and, when to Dr. 
Dykes's tune, " St. Bees," the old and familiar hymn, 
" Hark, my soul ! it is the Lord," echoes through the 
aisles, it is pleasing to remember that the inspired 
verses were the outpourings of " England's sweetest 
and most pious bard." 



XVII 

"LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM " 

A PILGRIMAGE FROM HUNTINGDON TO 
ST. IVES 



Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain 
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er, 
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course 
Delighted. There, fast rooted in his bank, 
Stand, never o'erlooked, our favourite elms, 
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut ; 
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream, 
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale, 
The sloping land recedes into the clouds ; 
Displaying on its varied side the grace 
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower, 
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells 
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear, 
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote. 

Cowper's " Task. 



XVII 
" LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM " 

A PILGRIMAGE FROM HUNTINGDON TO ST. IVES 

" ^T^HE thoughts of youth are long, long, thoughts," 
A wrote the New England poet Longfellow, and 
so they seemed to me as I stood on the site of the 
castle of Huntingdon, for there was something that 
seemed to suggest a previous knowledge of a locality 
visited for the first time. The Castle Hill, as it is 
called, is a gentle grassy eminence crowned with a circle 
of Scots firs. It commands the town and bridge of 
Huntingdon and a long stretch of level country, 
characteristic of the English Midlands, through which 
the Great Ouse threads its silver course to Ely and the 
North Sea. Was it merely its sweet-sounding name, 
I wondered, that seemed so familiar, and then 1 recol- 
lected that the link that bound this quiet English land- 
scape with the days of boyhood was to be found 
within the pages of Sir Walter Scott's Talisman. It 
was on such a mount as this, albeit amid the deserts 
of Syria, that a Scottish prince, David, Earl of Hunt- 
ingdon, under the assumed name of Sir Kenneth of 
Scotland, a simple Crusader knight, was deputed to 
guard the banner of England in the face of all comers. 
Who will ever forget that terrible moment when, 

233 



234 "LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM " 

lured from the post of honour to make sport for prin- 
cesses, he returned to St. George's Mount to find that 
the standard of England had disappeared, that the 
spear on which it had floated lay broken on the ground, 
and that the Prince of Scotland's faithful staghound 
Roswal was writhing, apparently in the agonies of 
death ? Had this brave Crusader lived some centuries 
later he might have been tempted to apply the words 
of Richard Lovelace : — 

I could not love thee (Deare) so much 
Lov'd I not Honour more. 

But then there would have been no stirring sequel, 
and Sir Walter knew better ; he himself possessed the 
talisman that made him what he was. Into the 
romance of The Talisman Sir Walter weaved the story 
of that David, Earl of Huntingdon, heir-presumptive 
to William the Lion ; but the first Scottish Earl of 
Huntingdon was David, youngest son of Malcolm 
Canmore, who had passed his youth at the English 
Court, and who at the age of twenty-nine married the 
widow of the Earl of Northampton, and by his mar- 
riage received the honour of Huntingdon, thereby be- 
coming an English Earl. This excellent prince is 
afterwards known in history as David I, the great 
patron of the Church. Thus it was that these two 
mounts were linked together, the mount of history 
and the mount of romance. 

The Castle has long since vanished, but beneath its 
slopes the Great Ouse still glides under its grand old 
bridge, with its picturesque moulded Gothic cornice, 
and away to the right, amid a dream of willow saughs 



"LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 235 

and poplars, rises the spire of St. Mary's, Godman- 
chester, while about two miles down the river, beyond 
the green meadows, the square tower of Hartford 
Church stands out in relief, bathed in sunshine. The 
old town of Huntingdon, on the Great North Road, 
has many memories. I do not forget, for example, 
that it is associated with Cromwell and Pepys, but this 
is a continuation of my Cowper pilgrimages, and to 
me the poet is still the genius loci. The spire of St. 
Mary's, Godmanchester, is a replica of Olney spire ; 
the square tower of Hartford indicates the direction 
of Cowper's favourite walk ; and the Great Ouse flows 
past Olney and Huntingdon alike. 

To Godmanchester I first bent my steps, about half 
a mile to the south of the old bridge on the Great 
North Road. This ancient borough consists of a 
double row of old Georgian dwellings. The church, 
carefully restored by Sir Gilbert Scott, is one of those 
haunts of ancient peace that are the glory of England. 
There are many more beautiful, but St. Mary's has 
its own interesting features. The old fifteenth-century 
stalls in the choir with their miserere seats or miseri- 
cordes, grotesquely carved underneath, still remain. 
Even the pews are carved. The handsome screen and 
the reredos, representing our Lord's Crucifixion, are 
modern. Retracing my steps, I crossed the bridge. 
Passing on my right " the mother-church of Hunting- 
don," with its Cromwellian associations, I reached 
Cowper's house, a plain brick eighteenth-century 
structure. You have passed hundreds of such houses 
in old market towns ; but through his letters Cowper 
preserved for us the record of his life in Huntingdon, 



236 "LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 

as elsewhere, and so this unpretentious dwelling, guilt- 
less of anything to show its connection with the poet, 
takes its place among the literary shrines of England. 
These two years at Huntingdon were among the 
happiest in the poet's life. He appreciated the quiet 
of his " beloved retirement," and told Lady Hesketh 
that if he had the choice of all England he could not 
have chosen better. But even a poet must come down 
to earth sometimes and deal with things mundane. It 
is amusing to listen to his early experiences in house- 
keeping before the Unwins took him in hand. " A 
man," he writes, " cannot always live upon sheep's 
heads and liver and lights, like the lions in the Tower," 
and consequently he launches out in reckless fashion, 
ordering joints, legs of lamb, beef for pies, that seem 
" endless encumbrances," even though his landlord 
and the washerwoman are admitted to share them. 
" Then, as to small beer, I am puzzled to pieces about 
it. I have bought as much for a shilling as will serve 
at least a month, and it is grown sour already." It is 
in such passages as these that we see the delightful 
character of the man. He enjoys so heartily the re- 
cording of his own failures in what was certainly to 
him a new branch of study, as if it were a bit of high 
comedy, and adds in the same vein : " In short, I 
never knew how to pity poor housekeepers before ; 
but now I cease to wonder at that politic cast which 
their occupation usually gives to their countenance, 
for it is really a matter full of perplexity." About 
this time, too, an extremely civil woollen draper culti- 
vated Cowper's acquaintance. It wasn't John Gilpin. 
He was a linen draper, " as all the world doth know." 



"LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 237 

This neighbour was the proud possessor of a bath, and 
promised Cowper the key of it, which he hoped to 
make use of in winter. Meantime, being midsummer, 
he had his morning dip in the Ouse — " a noble stream 
to bathe in," he says, and after his bath he seemed 
ready for anything. Thus he begins a letter, under 
date July 4th, 1765 : " Being just emerged from the 
Ouse, I sit down to thank you, my dear cousin, for 
your friendly and comfortable letter." There was 
also his friend the poor curate, a north-country divine, 
" who reads prayers here twice a day, all the year 
round, and travels on foot to serve two churches every 
Sunday through the year, his journey out and home 
being sixteen miles." When Cowper supped with him 
he was entertained in true English fashion to bread 
and cheese and a black jug of ale of the curate's own 
brewing. What better could he wish than a bumper 
of the historic Huntingdon ale ? This curate after- 
wards became Vicar of Leighton Bromswold, in the 
same county, the parish church of which George 
Herbert restored, after twenty years' neglect, at his 
own charges, on his appointment to the cure. Those 
who know Herbert's Country Parson, and especially 
his description of " the Parson's Church," will under- 
stand how he abhorred the slovenliness which now and 
again crept into the service of the church. During the 
Cromwellian period it was worse than slovenliness, and 
after the brilliant Caroline period the indifference of 
the eighteenth century to such matters called forth 
even from Cowper, who was regarded as a bit of a 
Methodist, a vigorous protest against the ruinous con- 
dition of parish churches. He did not see, for example, 



238 "LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 

why owls, bats, and magpies should contribute the 
principal part of the church music in many of these 
ancient edifices, and yet this was the age of Handel ! 
It is not easy to break the spell that causes one to 
linger around Huntingdon, thinking of Cowper and 
wandering about its old churches. But the day wears 
on, and if I must leave this old-fashioned town, at 
least the Great Ouse will be my companion as far as 
St. Ives, as it had already been from Olney to Bedford. 
Leaving Cowper House, I turned down Three Tun 
Lane on my way to the village of Hartford, whose 
church, Cowper tells Lady Hesketh, " is very prettily 
situated upon a rising ground, so close to the river that 
it washes the wall of the churchyard." The landscape 
differs little from that of my previous pilgrimage. 
Once again the stream is fringed with pollarded wil- 
lows, and the skyline of the distant woods is broken 
by rows of tall Lombardy poplars with their eighteenth- 
century atmosphere. In a meadow by the river I 
chatted with a group of anglers who were fishing for 
bream. Some were using small bleak and some 
gudgeon as ground bait, just as honest Izaak had 
recommended 250 years ago. One kindly brother of 
the angle offered me his whole catch when he learned 
how far I had travelled to visit his beloved Ouse, and 
on inquiring as to " the footpath way " another bade 
me " be sure and go by ' The Thicket ' after you pass 
Wyton." It seemed as if I had stepped backwards 
two centuries at least, into " A land where all things 
always seemed the same." 

When I reached the tiny village of Hartford, 
Cowper's Hartford (not to be confused with the 



"LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 239 

county town of Hertfordshire), I was impressed with 
the purity of the river Ouse as I rested in the ferry- 
boat beneath the walls of the old church and looked 
back across the meadows to the distant spire of St. 
Mary's, Godmanchester. Very pleasant it was to reach 
this sweet resting-place. Sometimes a sound of laugh- 
ing voices rippled down the stream as some Hunting- 
don folks rowed past, and then there was silence. 'Tis 
a tiny church that of Hartford, with a tiny chancel 
and miniature north and south aisles. The church is 
partly Norman, and behind the altar is a modern 
Norman reredos in keeping with the heavy chevron 
mouldings of the chancel arch. Silent as the grave 
was this haunt of Cowper save for the quick ticking of 
the clock in the square church tower, and as I rested 
I had leisure to read the mural inscriptions, such as, 
" This is none other but the House of God and this 
is the gate of Heaven." Over one of the doorways I 
noted, too, the impressive injunction, " The Lord is 
in His Holy Temple, let all the earth keep silence 
before Him." 

Presently a parson entered. I felt that both the 
silence and the spell were broken. We talked of his 
church and its associations. I gathered that he did not 
belong to the school of Dean Stanley or Dean Henson. 
He was strong in the exclusiveness of his beloved 
Church, the great ecclesia anglicana. Suddenly our 
conversation was interrupted in order that he might 
ring the bell for evensong, for it was the canonical hour 
of four, and I learned from him that he read prayers 
in the church twice daily. Few or none came to these 
services. Indeed, I saw no one in this out-of-the-world 



2 4 o "LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 

spot that could have been present. Sometimes, he said, 
the school children came. I thought of Cowper's 
friend the curate to whom I have already referred, 
and of his saintly predecessor, George Herbert, at the 
sound of whose saint's bell ringing to prayers the 
ploughman would rest for a moment. 'Twas a short 
service on week days, the vicar assured me, as I took 
a furtive glance at my watch and mentally calculated 
how far I was from St. Ives. No one responded to the 
call to prayer ; the vicar retired for a moment to don 
his surplice, and in another he had begun " the sen- 
tences." Very impressive was that simple service as 
we two read from the time-hallowed liturgy of the 
Church of England the verses and responses. It was 
the 27th day of the month, and almost before I could 
follow him he was reciting the first verse of the 126th 
Psalm : — 

When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion : then 
were we like unto them that dream. 

Verse by verse we read alternately the remarkable 
series of short Psalms that include the Nisi Dominus 
and the De Profundi*. The whole incident now seems 
like a dream ; that solitary surpliced figure at the 
reading-desk. How often had he stood there alone ! 
The " service " was soon over, for, of course, there 
was no sermon, and as the order for both morning and 
evening prayer appropriately concludes with the prayer 
of St. Chrysostom, since it refers to the Divine pro- 
mise where two or three are gathered together, I felt 
that such a prayer must be a daily consolation to the 
good man. I saw him no more. Mechanically I re- 



"LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 241 

sumed my pilgrim's way, " like unto them that 
dream." 

" Like unto them that dream," for later, as the sun 
was sinking westwards, the magical light of a Sep- 
tember afternoon touched tower and stream and tree, 
and that old Psalm in the old version of the Book of 
Common Prayer, older than our " authorised " ver- 
sion, for it appeared in the first Prayer Book of I549> 
seemed so much in touch with the surroundings. We 
had read of the " rivers in the south," and there, one 
of the most famous of the rivers in the south was 
lapping the very walls of the sanctuary. " He that 
now goeth forth on his way . . . shall doubtless come 
again with joy, and bring his sheaves with him." Some 
day you may return with joy, glad to revisit these 
quiet scenes, those old paths ; but the sheaves, man, 
the sheaves, what of them ? I have just passed an old- 
world thatched-roofed village. One of the houses 
bears the date 1648, the year before they executed 
King Charles I. Here are two more village churches — 
Houghton and Wyton. It is too late to visit them now, 
and I must not forget my angler friend's parting 
advice, to "be sure and go by ' The Thicket ' after 
you pass Wyton." 

If I thought that the Castlemount at Huntingdon 
seemed familiar, " The Thicket " was still more so in a 
less psychological sense ; for, while it proved to be a 
short cut to St. Ives through woodlands, it and the 
surrounding neighbourhood are a famous haunt of 
English artists. A distinguished Scottish landscape 
painter once described English art to me as being only 
fit for chocolate boxes. He might think so if he chose, 



242 "LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 

and there is namby-pamby art in England as elsewhere 
— it depends on the man, not the subject — but on the 
way to St. Ives I saw " chocolate box " originals at 
every turn, landscapes composed of reeds, willows, and 
poplars, with perhaps an old cottage, an old mill, or 
church tower thrown in. There was no necessity for 
" cooking," the compositions were perfect, just as 
Nature had designed them. The path through " The 
Thicket " was such a one as Shakespeare loved. It 
suggested Collins's Ode to Evening, with its " hamlets 
brown and dim-discovered spires." Trees of all kinds, 
sloes and brambles, lined the way. For the first time 
I noted that the hawthorns were now tinged with 
autumn, and the limes, too, always among the earliest 
to go, were shedding their leaves. To the west the 
river reflected a sunset glory, and a great Lombardy 
poplar stood out in grand relief against the rich, deep 
tones of the western sky as impressive as any minster 
spire. How that poplar fitted into the composition 
over and over again during the last mile or two ! To 
the east the tall tower and spire of All Saints, St. Ives, 
formed a conspicuous object, and I could just make 
out the famous bridge, with its quaint building, once 
a chapel, in the centre. All was restful, the cattle in 
the meadow yonder, the motionless windmill on the 
horizon : even an occasional splash in the river, or the 
distant sound of rowlocks, only accentuated the silence, 
the peace of a late September evening. The parish 
church of St. Ives was not yet closed when I reached 
the town, but it, too, was enshrouded in the shadows 
of its trees, and amid the heraldry of its blazoned 
windows. In the market-place even Cromwell on his 



"LIKE UNTO THEM THAT DREAM" 243 

pedestal, mellowed not so much by time as twilight, 
looked " guiltless of his country's blood." Thus did 
evening's " dewy fingers draw the gradual dusky veil " 
over a landscape that had been one long continuous 
joy from morn to eve. It is the charm of a September 
ramble that it closes just at a time when you have had 
sufficient walking for the day, when you can appreciate 
the restfulness of eventide, and watch from the bridge, 
or from the casement window of some old English 
hostelry, perhaps, the last faint streaks of daylight 
glimmering down the track of your day's pilgrimage. 



XVIII 
MEMORIES OF OLNEY 



To me Cowper is still the best of our descriptive poets for every- 
day wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has ! How he heightens, 
for example, your sense of winter-evening seclusion, by the twanging 
horn of the postman on the bridge ! That horn has rung in my ears 
ever since I first heard it. — Russell Lowell's "My Study Windows" 

Then came Olney bridge, not into the house, but into the conver- 
sation. — Cowper' 's Letters. 



XVIII 
MEMORIES OF OLNEY 

WILLIAM COWPER, in a spirited passage in 
The Task, describes the arrival of the post in 
Olney on a winter's evening. You hear his twanging 
horn just as this " herald of a noisy world " crosses 
the long, low bridge across the Ouse, at the south end 
of the town. On he comes from Newport Pagnell on 
the Holyhead coach road, " boots an' spurs an' a'," 
with his close-packed load. 

Yet careless what he brings, his one concern 

Is to conduct it to the destined inn ; 

And, having dropp'd th' expected bag, pass on. 

To the poet, that bridge had many associations 
during twenty years of his life. From its parapet how 
peaceful is the scene that presents itself, with its green, 
flat, willow-bordered meadows through which the 
Ouse winds in and out, as it does in the pages of his 
poems. The sun was glittering on its calm waters as 
I rested on the bridge, and about a mile and a half to 
the westward rose the embattled tower of the church 
of the poet's beloved Weston Underwood, backed by 
the hanging woods of the Throckmorton estate, the 
paths through which he himself has so lovingly de- 
scribed. Just beyond the bridge an angler is fishing 

247 



248 MEMORIES OF OLNEY 

for roach and jack amid the willows, and the fine 
chimes " undulating upon the listening ear " draw 
attention to the handsome tower and spire of Olney 
Church. Cowper was fond of the sound of bells, but 
was never more pleased than when the bells of Olney 
welcomed his dear cousin Lady Hesketh to the vicarage 
in June, 1786. Indeed, the only time that Cowper 
ever wrote anything disparaging concerning bells was 
once, I believe, when writing to his cousin he com- 
plained that he would not be responsible for any 
blunders in his letter as the smith and carpenter were 
both in the room hanging a bell. One can appreciate 
his exception, and, so far from " hanging " the bells, 
I had experienced on the preceding night at my 
quarters at " The Bull," of which more anon, that 
indescribable charm of hearing the midnight chimes 
from the church tower of an English country town. 
All is silent but for their rippling music, and mingling 
with that music is the feeling of strangeness. You are 
alone in an unfamiliar country, save for what you have 
read and seen through a poet's eyes. Ah ! but what 
a poet ! Is he not the one poet of England- who in- 
spires you with the feeling that you have known him 
since childhood, even as an elder brother ? You love 
him, and as the chimes strike the quarters during those 
eerie midnight hours you wonder whether you have 
come too late, and then you recollect that more than 
a century has come and gone, and that after life's 
fitful fever he sleeps not here, nor at Weston, but in 
distant Norfolk. You remember how when that last 
journey was arranged — it was only to be a temporary 
absence — Cowper had a presentiment that he would 



MEMORIES OF OLNEY 249 

never return to Weston, and how he wrote on a panel 
of the window-shutter of his bedroom the couplet : — 

Farewell, dear scenes, for ever closed to me ; 
Oh, for what sorrows must I now exchange ye. 

They were rough, unpolished lines, but they pro- 
ceeded from a bleeding heart. Truly " God moves 
in a mysterious way." 

To return to my lady, long had Cowper wearied 
for a visit from his cousin. He had mapped out the 
walks he would take her. " I will shew you my pros- 
pects, the hovel, the alcove, the Ouse and its banks, 
everything that I have described," and " the orchard 
through which, as I am writing here, I shall see you 
often pass, ... I already prefer to all the orchards in 
the world." It was this orchard that gave the name 
to Cowper's house, Orchardside. It was through this 
orchard that Cowper passed and repassed in his many 
visits to the vicarage during Newton's incumbency. 
Orchardside was presented to the town some years 
ago by Mr. W. H. Collingridge, a native of Olney, and 
now forms a museum of Cowper relics. Situated in 
the market-place, it was not an ideal place in some 
respects, and in 1773, in one of his seasons of gloom, 
his De Profundis, he sought a retreat in the vicarage in 
order, says his recent biographer, Mr. Wright, to avoid 
the noise of the annual fair. Once before, in 1771, 
Mrs. Unwin and he left Orchardside and stayed for a 
time at the Bull Inn, on the opposite side of the market- 
place, while one of their servants, suffering from small- 
pox, was isolated at home. Newton, however, writing 
from London, felt very uncomfortable about his 
friend's residence in an inn " surrounded by noise and 



250 MEMORIES OF OLNEY 

nonsense day and night," adding, " I know His pre- 
sence can comfort you in the midst of bulls and bears." 
Newton was evidently not a Shenstone, and did not 
know how to appreciate, even as the saintly Leighton 
did, the welcome at an old-world inn. " The Bull " 
remains notwithstanding, and the literary pilgrim may 
be safely recommended to sojourn under its hospitable 
roof. I cannot vouch for the " bears." 

Cowper was never fully satisfied with Olney. He 
often wished that his garden opened into the groves 
and wildernesses of Weston. To this picturesque 
village he removed in 1786. Here he remained for 
ten years, another stage in his chequered journey 
through life. Space will not permit me in the present 
paper to describe his favourite walks around Weston ; 
but as the route of my pilgrimage leads me from Olney 
eastward to Bedford, and later to Huntingdon, his 
residence from 1765 to 1767, I shall pass another of 
the poet's haunts at Lavendon Mill. From the north 
end of the town the road winds towards the borders 
of Buckinghamshire, with the Ouse as its companion. 
The landscape is typical of the Midland counties. 
Cowper thought that there were worse things than 
the " contemplation of a turnpike road " ; but on the 
way to Lavendon there are the wide horizons of a 
level country to attract the eye, always with distant 
church towers and poplars on the skyline. About a 
mile from Olney I looked back on the quiet country 
town. How beautifully in the middle distance the 
tower and spire of Olney rose above their guardian 
poplars. As I lingered, the chimes rang out the four 
quarters before striking eleven. Tennyson, too, knew 



MEMORIES OF OLNEY 251 

this type of scenery, and the incident reminded me of 
the passage in The Gardener's Daughter, the windy 
clanging of the minster clock across a league of grass 
washed by a slow, broad stream. Who has not heard 
of Rose, the gardener's daughter ? But I must not 
write of Rose in gentle Cowper's country ; rather 
must I return to Lady Hesketh, for it was in a letter 
addressed to her, dated 1st May, 1786, that I first 
learned of Lavendon. Writing of his walks, as usual, 
Cowper informs his cousin that : — 

" There was, indeed, some time since, in a neigh- 
bouring parish called Lavendon, a field, one side of 
which formed a terrace, and the other was planted 
with poplars, at whose feet ran the Ouse, that I used 
to account a little paradise ; but the poplars have been 
felled, and the scene has suffered so much by the loss 
that, though still in point of prospect beautiful, it has 
not charms sufficient to attract me now. A certain 
poet wrote a copy of verses on this melancholy occa- 
sion, which, though they have been printed, I dare say 
you never saw." 

The poet had already written to young Unwin to 
look out for them in The Gentleman' 's Magazine, but 
we must read them by Lavendon Mill itself. The 
verses are entitled The Poplar Field. 

The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade, 
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade ; 
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves, 
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives. 

Twelve years have elasped since I last took a view 
Of my favourite field, and the bank where they grew, 
And now in the grass, behold, they are laid, 
And the tree is my seat, that once lent me a shade. 



252 MEMORIES OF OLNEY 

The blackbird has fled to another retreat, 
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat, 
And the scene, where his melody charm'd me before, 
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more. 

I quote only the three descriptive verses. The re- 
maining two contain the moral. His fugitive years 
were all " hasting " away. He was fifty-five, " on the 
down-hill side of life." Since Cowper's time poplars 
have sprung up once more, but the poplar field can 
never again be Cowper's haunt. Notwithstanding the 
plaintive minor of the poem, the old mill and the 
poet's close or field were full of sunshine on the day 
of my visit. As you approach the mill, its gables just 
appear above the level of the highway, from which 
there is a rapid descent to the river. You pass the 
great barn where Newton sometimes preached, and 
turning sharply to the right, there, in front of you, 
is Lavendon Mill, partly brick and partly grey stone, 
time-worn and lichened. 'Tis a busy corner this, alive 
with dogs, ducks, geese, hens, and pigeons. As you 
lean on the wooden bridge that spans the Ouse your 
eye follows the course of the stream gliding past the 
tall flag-flowers and chestnuts, as in Tennyson's The 
Miller's Daughter ', until it rests on the eyot yonder 
covered with willows. Such is the scene of The Poplar 
Field. Poplars were growing until recently in the 
meadow ; they still clothe the high bank, from which 
you can see Olney spire, altogether an idyllic spot, if 
only that dog would cease its yelping. Here, too, 
comes the miller's daughter, not the gardener's 
daughter of whom I was reminded an hour ago. 

It is the miller's daughter, 
And she is grown 



MEMORIES OF OLNEY 253 

Well, I must at least apologise for the disturbance 
among the poultry. The dog that had resented my 
intrusion had roused the whole neighbourhood. There 
was no use trying to soothe him until I had made my 
peace with the miller's daughter. 

O, will she answer if I call ? 

After which, perchance, he (the dog) may condescend 
to wag his tail. I had intended to pass into the Poplar 
Field as quietly as the Ouse itself, and to read the 
pensive poem amid its own environment, comparing 
the fate of the fallen poplars with the " brotherhood 
of venerable trees " felled by the " degenerate 
Douglas " at Neidpath Castle. But even a literary 
pilgrim must relinquish his ideals under the pressure 
of circumstances, and so I watched the maiden vainly 
trying to coax some of the ducks ashore, " to take to 
market," as she explained to me ; but the ducks 
seemed to divine her purpose, having lost some com- 
panions in similar fashion on the previous day. Neither 
food nor kind words would tempt them to the maiden's 
feet. On they gabbled as they spluttered down the 
stream, disturbing even the stately swan at the eyot. 
No wonder that for the moment the words of a 
Tennysonian lyric best interpreted the scene. Nor 
would the courtly Cowper have taken it amiss. Though 
he himself shrank from the Laureateship at a time 
when the office was held by poetasters like Pye, Cowper 
and Tennyson had much in common in their love for 
quiet English scenery, and in their clear-ringing 
patriotism jealous of England's glory. Cowper would 
have restored the lost prestige of the Poets-Laureate 



254 MEMORIES OF OLNEY 

and linked Chaucer and Spenser with Wordsworth and 
Tennyson. To return to the miller's daughter, it is 
true that instead of a Tennysonian lyric the poet 
might have expected from me — 

Perhaps some bonny Caledonian air 
All birks and braes ; 

to quote from his Table Talk. But no, Sir Cowper, 
I am on English ground, like the hundred pipers at 
Carlisle, and so as I leave Lavendon Mill I am still 
haunted by the refrain — 

It is the miller's daughter, 

And she is grown so dear, so dear. 

There ! I knew it would come out. All the more 
reason to hasten on my way. Bedford town is still a 
long way off ; so fare thee well, sweet Lavendon Mill ! 
There are three features of an old-world village that 
the literary pilgrim cannot easily pass, an old bridge, 
an old inn, and an old church ; and when these three 
are so delightfully contiguous as at Turvey, half-way 
between Olney and Bedford, delay is inevitable. 
After the episode at Lavendon Mill, the gentle Ouse 
did not again cross my path until I reached the long, 
low bridge that connects Buckinghamshire with Bed- 
fordshire. Here a troop of schoolboys were proceed- 
ing to the river to fish for chub and roach. Happy 
boys by their native stream ; when they gravitate to 
London, as some will do, how they will remember 
Turvey Bridge ! Above the bridge stood the mill, and 
in the centre of the mill-pond someone in the olden 
time had erected the statue of an unhappy-looking 
classical gentleman, accompanied by what I took to be 



MEMORIES OF OLNEY 255 

a dolphin. The " orra-man," who is always to be 
found either at the bridge or the inn, told me that 
" the group " represented Jonah and the whale. Per- 
haps he was right, for certainly, assuming that the 
relations and relative proportions of Jonah and the 
whale were reversed from those recorded in the autho- 
rised version of the story, " Jonah " did look as if he 
were recovering from a severe indigestion. The inn 
at the Bedford end of the bridge is called " The 
Three Fishes." As represented on the sign, they 
were ugly monsters, pikes evidently. The inn itself 
is an interesting, if decayed, structure, with a porch 
dated 1624, and a mark on the wall recording the fact 
that the river had here risen four feet above the road- 
way on the 26th September, 1797. Poor Cowper by 
that time had gone into Norfolk, far from his beloved 
Ouse, for that record flood was but three years before 
his death. The year 1797 was a notable one for the 
parishioners of Turvey in another respect, for it was 
in that year that Legh Richmond was ordained a 
deacon of the English Church, and eight years later 
became rector of Turvey. One cannot help thinking 
that had it been Cowper's lot to have had as his pastor 
the author of The Dairyman's Daughter (that old- 
fashioned evangelical classic with its vivid description 
of English scenery), instead of the joint author of the 
Olney hymns, he would have enjoyed a companion- 
ship more akin to his own temperament. 

The beautiful church of All Saints at Turvey is 
rich in altar-tombs, recumbent effigies in alabaster 
dating from Henry VII, the boast of heraldry and the 
pomp of power, in memory of the Mordaunt family, 



256 MEMORIES OF OLNEY 

Earls of Peterborough ; but there was nothing here 
to remind me of Cowper, nor will there be anything 
perhaps until I reach Huntingdon. Among the knick- 
knacks at the manor-house of Turvey Abbey are pre- 
served, I believe, Cowper's silver shoe-buckles, a link 
certainly, for do they not recall the bard of Olney in 
his happier days, spick-and-span, setting out on a visit 
to the Throckmortons ? or penning a poem of thanks 
to my Lady Hesketh for some dainty present, or a 
letter to the same sweet cousin on receipt of a tortoise- 
shell snuff-box with a landscape on the lid and the 
three hares in the foreground ? You think of that 
little group at Orchardside as Alfred Austin has 
described them in a sentence, Cowper pacing the 
red-walled garden paths composing The Task, Mrs. 
Unwin coming out of the Georgian hall to bring a 
comforter if the air was chill, and, in the evening, 
Lady Austen playing on the harpsichord a serene 
melody of Mozart breathing wise content with things 
in general. Happy for him were the times when the 
day would break and the shadows of his tragic sorrow 
flee away. Then would we have the William Cowper 
that we love so well, whose purest joys he himself has 
described : — 

Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen, 
Delightful industry enjoyed at home, 
And Nature in her cultivated trim 
Dress'd to his taste, inviting him abroad. 



XIX 

IN A COLINTON GARDEN 

WINTER 



I once ventured to prefer a plea for Winter — winter in the country 
— on which a trenchant critic observed that winter in the country was 
all very well when you lived within hail of the town, and could see 
your friends daily to enlarge upon the charms of solitude. Cowper, in 
a sly, humorous aside, had long ago made a similar reply : — 

How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude — 
But grant me still a friend in my retreat, 
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet. 

I am willing to admit, therefore, that the student should select a 
winter hermitage to which the noise of the city may come to him 
across the fields. The fierce pressure of the crowd is certainly un- 
wholesome, but a man who lives all the year round among hedges and 
ditches is apt to grow mouldy. A little of both is best. If you spend 
your afternoon at your club in town, you will enjoy all the more the 
walk home beneath the leafless trees in the starlight, when the owls 
are hooting from the ivy. — Sir John Skeltori's " 7 able Talk" 



XIX 
IN A COLINTON GARDEN : 



WINTER 



IT is a February day of brilliant sunshine, and yet 
a cold west wind is blowing, trying alike to the 
tiny leaves of the rose-bushes that have come before 
the swallow dares and to those of us who somewhat 
impatiently, perhaps, are longing for the spring. After 
all, may we not console ourselves with the thought 
that to live in a land of summer afternoons might be- 
come monotonous ? Here is no monotony. Our 
weather does not admit of it. Winter's frozen 
hand is tempered with uncertainties. Yesterday the 
garden was frost-bound ; to-day there is almost a fore- 
taste of spring, and these alternations go on far into 
the early summer. To-day, as I have said, a cold west 
wind is blowing fresh from the upper reaches of our 
river. To-morrow the east wind may sweep into my 
garden the distance-mellowed jangling of innumerable 
bells from the Scottish capital, a few miles distant. 
At the close of the introductory paper to this series 
I described " the old paths " of the Homeland 
as they appeared after my return from Hertford- 
shire. Here in this concluding paper I cannot refrain 
from reverting to the old subject of the vagaries of 

259 



260 IN A COLINTON GARDEN 

our Scottish weather and its effect on the garden. 
Fitful gleams of sunshine lit up October now and 
then, when the garden was a medley of belated flowers. 
In the herbaceous garden the grand blue delphinium 
was no more, but the phlox remained, and sweet peas 
still blossomed. Garden varieties of the cowslip 
bloomed out of their season in the borders, along with 
sweet william, the purple autumn crocus, and the 
yellow St. John's wort, and one great white regal fox- 
glove stood alone of all its peers. In November, during 
St. Martin's summer, a few roses still lingered, while 
the chrysanthemums reigned supreme in glorious dis- 
order. A few weeks more, and on the first Sunday of 
December I bade farewell to the last of the white 
foxgloves ; its beautiful white bells were now tinged 
with yellow, and it no longer stood erect. Like the 
old year, it was dying. Beyond the garden there were 
like signs of the inevitable autumnal decay. 

The woods are hushed, their music is no more, 
The leaf is dead, 

but only for a time. We love to think that the new 
spring is heralded by the appearance of the first snow- 
drop, and often on the leafless bough the thrush 

Sings a new song to the New Year. 

The garden slopes southward to the Water of Leith. 
Beyond it are the Pentland Hills, culminating in Aller- 
muir and Kirkyetton (or Caerketton). Allermuir, the 
hill nearest my garden, is sprinkled with snow, and the 
rivulets that in summer are indicated by a richer green 
are at the present moment tracks of melted snow 



IN A COL1NTON GARDEN 261 

gleaming like silver in the winter sunshine. Some- 
times Allermuir itself gleams with a silver sheen. You 
do not often see this effect. It occurs when, during a 
partial thaw, the sun strikes through a bank of cloud 
straight on the wet, snowy hill-side, when its rays are 
thus focussed on one particular spot ; hence one hill 
may be gleaming like silver while another remains cold 
and white. Yonder, too, in the park the crows are 
wheeling in mid-air, as dark as ravens they may be ? 
but to the eye they are glistening gleams of light, their 
backs and wings reflecting the sunshine, and it is only 
when they pass to the northward that you note their 
sable plumes. In the garden itself, wherever there are 
leaves there is light. The strawberry leaves glisten, 
the laurels and japonica at the foot of the garden near 
the river sparkle with a richer sheen, and across the 
valley the ivy that clothes yonder leafless boughs 
shimmers in the unwonted sunshine. 

Such is the world out of doors, cold but lusty. 
Within the summer-house facing the hills I can sit in 
comfort and dip here and there into my books. And 
yet it seems but yesterday since it was necessary to quit 
this haunt of peace and seek the shade of the great 
elm under which " Mike," faithfullest of Irish terriers, 
lies stretched in the cool grass dreaming his dreams, 
but always with one half-shut watchful eye waiting 
for the closing of the book, like a weary child at sermon 
time. 

Ah, those summer evenings ! We think of them 
now when the snow is on the hill. It is a calm even- 
ing in early June once more. Surely that is the corn- 
crake we hear, and, yes, there is the distant note of 



262 IN A COLINTON GARDEN 

the cuckoo. Amid the deepening shadows, for it is 
nearly ten o'clock, the outlines of the hills, though not 
crisp and sharp, are still well defined. It is an evening 
for noting lights and shadows, for studying " values," 
as the painter would say, for grouping masses of foliage. 
Yonder, for instance, is the white hawthorn, of a snowy 
whiteness compared with the lower tone of the sky. 
How grandly, too, the sycamores stand out, clothed in 
the full leafage of early summer. Through it all there 
is the murmur of the river rippling over the weir, the 
river of many memories, the ever-present Water of 
Leith. 

But the lower temperature is not conducive to day- 
dreaming, and the old summer-house, somewhat 
neglected in summer time, receives once more its share 
of attention. Its bookshelves tell of sunny lands and 
sunny gardens over the hills and far away. Some I 
have visited, some I have seen only with the inward 
eye ; but all are dear to the Rambler in Arcadia. 
Here, for example, are the essays of Bacon that I love, 
mainly because of one entitled Of Gardens. Opening 
the volume at random, my eyes light on this passage : — 

" Alonso of Arragon was wont to say in commenda- 
tion of age, that age appeareth best in four things — 
old wood best to burn ; old wine to drink ; old friends 
to trust ; and old authors to read." 

I am afraid that is the spirit in which I make my 
selection of books on gardens and gardening. And so, 
with a prospect that is all sunshine, yet without heat, 
and with a horizon bounded by snow-clad hills, one 
may revel in a catalogue of old-world fruits and 
flowers. Thus I read on, and note my Lord Verulam's 



IN A COLINTON GARDEN 263 

hints for laying out an Elizabethan garden with alleys, 
hedges, and arches, with little turrets for bird-cages, 
with coloured glass here and there for the sun to play 
on, and in the centre of this mosaic a mount about 
thirty feet high, crowned with a banqueting-house. 
Ah me ! I look round the walls of my homely shelter 
while the west wind howls overhead amid the branches 
of the elm. In one of Davy Garrick's plays there is 
an account of a city merchant who had bought a place 
in the country and erected a high octagon summer- 
house on the mast of a ship, an East Indiaman, from 
which he could see all the coaches, chariots, and 
chaises pass up and down the road to London. " I'll 
mount you up there in the afternoon, my lord. 'Tis 
the pleasantest place in the world to take a pipe and a 
bottle ; and so you shall say, my lord." We all know 
that citizen. When in London he lived east of Temple 
Bar. He was a friend of John Gilpin, " with a snug 
wig trimmed round his broad face as close as a new-cut 
yew hedge." 

This reminds me once again of my dear old friend 
Cowper, for I cannot forget him. His Letters should 
be read in a garden and nowhere else. What does he 
say of the charms of a summer-house ? 

" I write in a nook that 1 call my boudoir. It is a 
summer-house not much bigger than a sedan-chair, 
the door of which opens into the garden, that is now 
crowded with pinks, roses, and honeysuckles, and the 
window into my neighbour's orchard." 

The above extract is quoted from a letter dated 
June 25th, 1785. Nearly a year later — namely, on May 



264 IN A COLINTON GARDEN 

25th, 1786 (I like to be exact with these old-world 
dates) — we have a further reference to his summer- 
house, in a passage from which I have already 
partly quoted. He is writing to his cousin, Lady 
Hesketh : — 

" I have at length, my cousin, found my way into 
my summer abode. I believe that I described it to 
you some time since, and will therefore now leave it 
undescribed. I will only say that I am writing in a 
bandbox, situated, at least in my account, delightfully, 
because it has a window in one side that opens into 
that orchard, through which, as I am sitting here, I 
shall see you often pass, and which therefore I akeady 
prefer to all the orchards in the world." 

Is not this very charming ? Lady Hesketh, the 
brilliant beauty who attracted all eyes at Ranelagh ! 
" I shall see you often pass." 

Ye shepherds, tell me, tell me have you seen 
My Flora pass this way ? 

How the soft music of her presence would soothe 
the spirit of this sensitive poet ! Ah, those ladies of 
old time ! Only in dreams may we see my lady pass 
this way. You remember Villon's Ballade of Dead 
Ladies. This was its envoi, as translated by Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti : — 

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, 

Where they are gone, nor yet this year, 

Except with that for an overword — 

But where are the snows of yester-year ? 

Where, indeed ! Where are the snows of yesterday ? 
They are fading even now on Allermuir hill-side as I 



IN A COLINTON GARDEN 265 

look up from my book. And what is the moral ? 

Surely this : — 

Vita quid est hominis ? Viridis floriscula mortis, 
Sole oriente oriens, sole cadente cadens. 

I should like to refer also to William Shenstone, 
another of the eighteenth-century poets and letter- 
writers, and the father (shall I say ?) of modern land- 
scape gardening ; but I have already recorded in this 
volume my impressions of a visit to his pleasure- 
grounds at The Leasowes, the small estate that was 
his finest poem, even as in the following century 
Abbotsford was " the consecration and the poet's 
dream " of Sir Walter Scott. 

Shenstone notwithstanding, those were the days of 
the topiarius ; but even then there were occasional 
protests against the mutilation of trees by the great 
shears of the topiarian artist. " We run into sculp- 
ture," writes the essayist in the Guardian of 29th 
September, 171 3, " and are yet better pleased to have 
our trees in the most awkward figures of men and 
animals." In a delightful vein of humour and satire 
he concludes his paper by describing a catalogue of 
yews, box, and other evergreens to be sold by an enter- 
prising gardener. Some of the lots were as follows : — 

" Adam and Eve in yew ; Adam a little shattered 
by the fall of the tree of knowledge in the great storm ; 
Eve and the serpent very flourishing. 

" The tower of Babel, not yet finished. 

" St. George in box ; his arm scarce long enough, 
but will be in a condition to stick the dragon by next 
April. 

" A pair of giants, stunted, to be sold cheap. 



266 IN A COLINTON GARDEN 

" Divers eminent modern poets in bays, somewhat 
blighted, to be disposed of, a pennyworth. 

" Noah's Ark in holly, standing on the mount ; the 
ribs a little damaged for want of water." 

Nature and the love of Nature were thus ever and 
anon reasserting themselves. The spirit of the old 
Adam had never been entirely " shattered." With 
regard to these formal gardens Bacon admits that 
" you may see as good sights many times in tarts," 
and then goes on to describe his heath, a wilderness 
of sweetbriar and honeysuckle, set with primroses, 
cowslips, and wild thyme. There is room also for the 
daisy, the periwinkle, and sweet william, for red roses, 
juniper, holly, bays, and rosemary. When next I re- 
visit thy shrine, O large-browed Verulam, in that fine 
old Saxon church of St. Michael's, by the classic banks 
of Ver, near St. Albans, I shall not forget thy heath. 

One cannot but smilingly contrast Bacon's know- 
ledge of flowers with the Seigneur de Montaigne's sly 
remark that he can scarcely distinguish the cabbage 
from the lettuce in his garden. And here on the book- 
shelf, side by side with Montaigne and Bacon, is grand 
old Burton, another of the Elizabethans, who will 
gossip with you learnedly by the hour on old-fashioned 
herbs and simples and their uses. He, too, like Bacon, 
could appreciate mounts and arbours and artificial 
wildernesses, as well as admire the view from such 
places as Glastonbury Tower, Box Hill, in Surrey, or 
from " Oldbury, in the confines of Warwickshire, 
w T here I have often looked about me with great delight, 
at the foot of which hill I was born." 

Among my favourite essays in the Spectator is that 



IN A COLINTON GARDEN 267 

dated 6th September, 171 2, in which Joseph Addison 
describes his ideal of a garden. He also had his wilder- 
ness, and loved his banks of violets and primroses. 

" My flowers," he writes, " grow up in several parts 
of the garden in the greatest luxuriancy and profusion. 
I am so far from being fond of any particular one, by 
reason of its rarity, that if I meet with any one in a 
field which pleases me, I give it a place in my garden. 
By this means when a stranger walks with me, he is 
surprised to see several large spots of ground covered 
with ten thousand different colours, and has often 
singled out flowers that he might have met with under 
a common hedge, in a field, or in a meadow, as some 
of the greatest beauties of the place." 

Addison also wished his garden to be a sanctuary 
for his feathered friends. " I value my garden more 
for being full of blackbirds than cherries, and very 
frankly give them fruit for their songs." In both ways 
his views appeal to me. I love to transplant wild 
flowers to the wild part of my garden either for their 
beauty or association. It is pleasant to know that those 
primroses, for example, are descended from one that 
once grew with hundreds of others by the banks of the 
Nith at Robert Burns's farm of Ellisland, and that 
this flourishing clump has come from Hughenden. 
Here are ferns from Galloway and the Hebrides, fox- 
gloves from Charles Lamb's country in Hertfordshire, 
honeysuckle from Tennyson's home in Surrey, and 
wind-flowers from the copse by Childsworth Farm that 
sheltered the Scholar-Gipsy. The showy cranesbills 
that adorn the garden slope in midsummer have 
sprung from seeds gathered in a distant meadow ; 



268 IN A COLINTON GARDEN 

and some cowslip seeds, Shakespeare's favourite 
cowslip, brought from near Harry Percy's Castle of 
Warkworth, in Northumberland, immortalised by 
Shakespeare, have taken kindly root side by side with 
cowslips from the Sussex Downs. Thus do the north 
and the south of England add to the pale glories of 
the spring. I also agree with what Addison says about 
blackbirds. Surely one may share with them the 
homely fruit of a Scottish garden ! There is enough 
and to spare, even of cherries. Last year, when we 
returned from our summer rambles, the garden looked 
like a birds' paradise. Though the strawberries were 
past, the cherries, rasps, and gooseberries were still in 
tempting condition. The birds were everywhere in 
evidence, particularly blackbirds and thrushes. They 
had been left so long in undisturbed possession that 
they seemed to resent our return. The young birds 
apparently did not know what to make of it, and 
played hide-and-seek, hopping round the bushes until 
their mothers, with a low, liquid chick-cbick note, gave 
their fledglings the hint that we were entitled to share 
in Nature's harvesting. Now, in winter time the non- 
migratory birds have become pensioners more or less, 
and the blue and great tits who deserted the garden all 
the summer have returned to their winter quarters 
close to our windows. The acrobatic performances of 
the tits with cocoanuts and bits of suet are still literally 
in full swing. 

When all is said it comes to this, that your true lover 
of gardens, like the true lover of literature and art, 
must have a catholic taste. To the book-lover the full- 
blooded richness of the Elizabethan Age, the dainty, 



IN A COLINTON GARDEN 269 

minuet-like verse of the days of Queen Anne, the wood- 
notes wild that heralded the return to Nature with the 
dawn of the nineteenth century, have each a corner 
in his heart of hearts. So, also, in art there are pictures 
that we love for their delicate perfection of detail, 
just as there are others that can convey a world of 
meaning in the broad brush of the impressionist. We 
love them all, the beauty of a Highland moor or an 
English heath, and the beauty of an Italian garden. 
Why shouldn't we ? And so, as I replace my Spectators, 

I pat them kindly on the back, just to see that they 
are trim and even on the shelf, as they should be ; 
while with that " inward eye which is the bliss of 
solitude " I can picture that formal garden with its 
flight of steps, its terraces, marble statuary, canals, 
fountains, and square grass plots, all as described in 
the Spectator for July 8th, 171 2. Bathe that old-time 
garden in moonlight. Let Cynthia's beams w T hiten 
the white marble, glitter on the canal, let the nightin- 
gale fill the evening air with melody ; and let our 
dainty dilettante in faultless satins and brocade walk 
to and fro between the alleys, reciting Milton's 

II Penseroso, and we have a typical picture of the 
courtliness of the eighteenth century. 

A moonlight garden ! The very thought pleases 
one, and in the evening before concluding this paper 
I step into the garden to compare this picture with 
that of a Scottish garden in winter time, with the 
snow glistening on the white hills, whiter than the 
moon-bathed statuary, a nocturne in silver. The 
moon in fullest radiance hangs in the great cloudless 
vault of Heaven ; in the south-west only the greater 



270 IN A COLINTON GARDEN 

stars, such as the constellation of Orion, are visible ; 
while in the south-east Kirkyetton is lost in a pile of 
evening clouds resting on its summit. How delicate 
is the gradation from snow-clad hill to snowy cloud- 
land ! Overhead every twig of the elm, every " barky 
finger," as Shakespeare says, stands out in clear relief, 
and the trimly pruned rasp canes set in regular lines 
cast their chequered shadows over the snow. 



XX 

THE EPILOGUE 



Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered 
reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there is no measure- 
ment of time, and in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life's 
ocean three years hasten away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy 
sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a still valley. 
Hawthorne *s " Mosses from an old Manse." 



XX 

THE EPILOGUE 

" ^ I ^HE e'en brings a' hame," and it is not inappro- 
J. priate that the record of these literary pil- 
grimages in the old paths should close amid the fitful 
flickerings of the bookroom fire. Here one can live 
over again those happy memories, and it is the charm 
of the wanderings of a literary pilgrim that, when in 
the mood, you have only to take from the bookshelves 
the volumes containing all that is best of those whose 
haunts you have been visiting in the summers and 
autumns of the past. Stay, do not trim the lamp just 
yet. The motto of the opening paper might equally 
apply to the Epilogue — 

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
I summon up remembrance of things past. 

Who ever wrote anything so divinely well as our 
sweetest Shakespeare ? You have only to think of 
Arden, and once more Rosalind and Cicely come trip- 
ping through the woodlands. The particular locus of 
Shakespeare's plays, Venice or Padua, Athens or 
Messina, does not concern me ; these place-names are 
incidental to the source of the play. I think only of 
Perdita as a sweet English maiden with her daffodils, 
her rosemary and rue. There's Christopher Sly, the 

T 273 



274 THE EPILOGUE 

tinker, old Sly's son of Burton Heath, the merry rogue, 
who ran up a score for ale at Marian Hacket's ! What 
had he to do with learned Padua ? I am sure it was 
a descendant of Christopher whom I met on his way 
from Mary Uff's. There's Dogberry, too, who, I 
fancy, caught Shakespeare napping in the lost porch 
of the parish church at Grendon Underwood, and 
Autolycus, whom I met near Wheathampstead in the 
vicinity of No Man's Land. It was delightful to listen 
to his flow of wit as he plied his wares at Luton market 
in Bedfordshire. From Shakespeare's Arden, for I am 
not responsible for the later wanderings of Autolycus, 
'tis but a step to Shenstone's Arcady, " The Leasowes," 
that poet's dream, around which the iron grip of Bir- 
mingham is gradually tightening. Memories of the 
gentle Cowper still cling to my inward visions of Olney 
and Huntingdon, with their great river and dim dis- 
covered spires hid away amid their wealth of poplars. 
Somewhere by the pleasant banks of Lea I can 
picture that pathetic couple Charles and Mary Lamb 
in search of some river-side inn where they may rest at 
noonday and call for Hertfordshire ale. You can see 
Lamb poking fun at the angler of the cockney school, 
who patiently sits all day by the sluggish stream specu- 
lating upon traditionary gudgeons. Now am I once 
again at Lichfield and I am dreaming of " the Ladies 
of the Vale," the ladies of old time, not those of whom 
Villon sang, for I am thinking of Mrs. Thrale, Lady 
Hesketh, and Bolingbroke's sister, Henrietta St. John, 
Lady Luxborough. Nor must I forget sweet Gulielma 
Penn, who rests at Jordans. There is the Scholar- 
Gipsy, too. Who would have remembered him were 



THE EPILOGUE 275 

it not for Matthew Arnold ? Arnold recalls Oxford, 
and I cannot dissociate " that sweet city with her 
dreaming spires " from the author of The Christian 
Year^ and so I fancy I hear Newman saying of the 
elusive Keble, with a smile on his saintly face, " How 
can I profess to paint a man who will not sit for his 
picture ? " 

When Iwish to recall the pensive Gray and " Penn, 
the Apostle," the glorious Milton at Chalfont, or the 
Disraelis at Bradenham and Hughenden, I step once 
more into the garden, for sometimes, when the half- 
moon dimly lights the southern horizon and brings 
out in relief a row of beeches whose tapering branches 
point towards the sky, sometimes at such an hour I 
fancy that these Pentland Hills of mine are the distant 
Chilterns, and that my beeches are akin to those that 
shelter the graves of the Penns and Penningtons, the 
beeches that Beaconsfield and Thomas Gray loved so 
well, " dreaming out their old stories to the winds." 



PRINTED BY 

WILLIAM BKENDON AND SON. L"D. 

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